


Never Sleep

by not_whelmed_yet



Series: Drifting Together [2]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Action, All characters except Ratchet flashbacks only, Angst, Backstory, Canon Compliant (Mostly), Dreams and Nightmares, Flashbacks, Gen, Isolation, Past Torture, Pre-Relationship, canon fill-in scenes, past dysfunctional relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-18 01:06:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 33,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14201703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/not_whelmed_yet/pseuds/not_whelmed_yet
Summary: Ratchet's been looking for Drift for several weeks. To make matters worse, he's started dreaming again - and reliving memories he's tried to bury.(A sequel to Observing Drift, but I think it stands quite well alone)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello again! I've missed you all! Writing this story took longer than I expected. But the good news is that since the first draft is complete I can promise regular updates Tuesdays and Fridays.
> 
> This isn't the sequel I'd hinted about. I was _going_ to write that sequel and then realized we needed this first: since we know all about Drift's past and secret insecurities we needed to know a bit more about Ratchet before they could feel like equal players in any romantic relationship I might be theoretically planning on writing.... In the process I stumbled into a lot of Ratchet backstory angst and a bit of a plot - I hope you enjoy the ride!
> 
> (And let me know if I'm missing any specific tags/warnings that you need)

“Do you ever worry about the future?”

Orion laughed. Moonlight splashed across his faceplate as he tipped his head back against the balcony railing, struggling to regain control of himself. The air pulsed with the base thrum of music seeping out under the door. Roller was playing DJ for this impromptu house party, the party Ratchet had fled out onto the balcony. Orion had wandered out to find him and they’d ended up chatting aimlessly, clinking glasses of engex and getting just tipsy enough for things to start to get vulnerable.

But Orion laughed.

“Hey, forget about it,” Ratchet said, waving Orion Pax and his stupid cheerful drunken laughter away. “It was a stupid question.”

“No, no,” Orion said. “Don’t, sorry, I wasn’t laughing at you. It’s just...sometimes when I stand on the street I can’t stop thinking about how fragile everything is. Everything. Society. We’re built on a knife’s edge of unspoken laws and social hierarchies and sometimes it just feels so unreal I can’t believe it hasn’t already crumbled. I worry a lot, mate.”

“Oh,” Ratchet said. “I wasn’t thinking quite so...big.” He patted Orion on the shoulder. “‘s deep, Pax. I was thinking about graduation.”

“I think about graduation as little as possible,” Orion said, punctuating the sentence by pouring the bottle out into his empty glass until it ran empty.

“I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s right around the corner. The placement exams are only a few weeks away. What happens if I fail? What do they do with you if the the Taxonomy says you ought to be a medic but you aren’t cut out for the job?”

“You’re not going to fail!” Orion smiled over at him, a dopey and overcharged grin. “Thunders tells me you’re, like, a surgical prodigy.”

“You’re just saying that because you didn’t see my written exam scores,” Ratchet said. He ground his helm against the heel of his hand. “The thing I’m good at is, like, a tiny part of being a medic. Being good at people and managing staff and memorizing differential diagnoses and actually knowing all this slag is the important stuff and I’m terrible at all of those things. Do they reformat medics who can’t cut it? Or do they just demote them to support staff?”

“You don’t have anything to worry about,” Orion assured him. “I’m the one who should be worrying. Me? As a security officer? Have they even met me?”

“Well, no. The point is that the placement exams and the Taxonomy are meant to be impersonal and thus infallible.” Ratchet knocked back the rest of his engex and set the glass on the railing. “Ugh, I don’t know. I don’t want things to change, but I desperately want _me_ to change. I wish I could just skip ahead to the part where I know what I’m doing.”

Orion slung his arm around Ratchet’s shoulder. “Ratchet, friend, my friend. You are way too serious for a mech with this much engex in you. Let’s hit the dance floor, see if we can’t loosen you up.”

“I don’t really dance.”

“Well, if you won’t dance, at least you can replace this bottle. It’s empty for some reason. I’ve gotta go mingle. Roller’s gonna be cross if I leave him alone to run the party after organizing the damned thing. And we wouldn’t want people thinking we were an item or something.” With that he excused himself back into the roar and pulsing lights of the party. Ratchet watched him go, empty drink in hand, fantasizing vaguely about jumping over the side of the balcony rather than walk back through that mass of bots to get to the exit.

He’d wait out here a few more minutes and try to quell that nervy empty feeling that had settled in his spark in Orion’s wake.

 

* * *

 

Ratchet clenched his hand, then tried to flex his fingers out smoothly. With a crunch and a click, the forefinger and middle finger caught partway through the extension. He forced them past the sticking point and fumbled for his detailing kit. They just needed oiling, that’d solve it.

He continued ignoring the persistent ache that had lingered in those fingers for most of the past month.

 

* * *

 

Ratchet could see the rest of them ahead of him, the line stretched thin as they wound their way down the narrow mountain path. Ratchet was bringing up the rear at his insistence, because he was getting damned tired of hiding his limp from the rest of the bots on the squad.

Nothing ever went smooth and Ratchet hadn’t expected this mission would. But he’d hoped for more than a pitiful handful of survivors. All of them newframes. Nobody with the kind of clout to ask Ratchet the sort of questions he desperately didn’t want to answer. Nobody had asked about their fuel supply and how he was managing to stretch their emergency medical rations out for seven bots. His optics blurred woozily, but he was just going to have to power through. The soldiers needed it more. They had heavier frames, worse injuries.

Soon they’d either get to the Autobot outpost on this mountain or the Decepticon patrols would spot them and bring them in. Well, they’d kill the squad. They’d bring Ratchet in. Ratchet wasn’t in a hurry to end up a victim of Decepticon hospitality again, which is what was powering him over the rough terrain, tank aching and ankle joint screaming.

Primus, what was he going to tell Optimus? Ratchet paused for a second to let his gyros recalibrate, the world spinning a bit. He swiped his hand roughly over his face and resisted the urge to scream. Screaming would attract attention. Screaming would attract Decepticons and, worse yet, the squad’s concern. They needed someone to lead them right now and there was nobody else to do that except Ratchet. So he was going to start walking again and catch up with them. Any minute now.

He’d just sit down for a moment first until the spinning stopped.

 

* * *

 

There were no official diagnostic tests for form fatigue—it was all based on the medic’s clinical observations. Pain in the extremities. Loss of mobility. Persistent noises and joints freezing up.

There wasn’t a lot of clinical information on age of onset, but Ratchet felt safe pinning himself as ‘early onset’ anyway. He was only two million years old, damnit. He wasn’t nearly old enough to feel this old and worn along the edges. And sure, most bots’ hands didn’t get half the use his did, but most bots didn’t _need_ their hands half as much as he did.

But while he could no longer ignore the obvious diagnosis, that didn’t mean it was going to get worse. Ratchet had seen patients linger in a state of mild form fatigue for millions of years. So it was inconvenient. So sometimes his hands froze up and he had to knock them back in line. So sometimes (always) they hurt a little bit. He’d cope.

 

* * *

 

“Do you know why you’re here?” Administrator Panax steepled his fingers and looked over at Ratchet through gold optics. The hospital administrator was an intimidating figure, a jet made of sharp angles and disapproval. Or maybe that was just the way he was looking at Ratchet.

Ratchet did his best not to squirm and nodded. “You’re here to tell me my placement examination score and inform me who my mentor will be during my residency at your hospital. Sir.” _Slag, he’d failed, hadn’t he?_ The look on Administrator Panax’s face was radiating disapproval and...disgust? He’d failed so badly that the administrator was insulted to even have him in his presence.

“You would like that, wouldn’t you?”

“What?” Ratchet blinked in confusion, then corrected. “Sir? What do you mean by that?”

“I’ve dealt with more than a few cheaters in my day,” Administrator Panax said, gliding out of his chair and stalking around his desk. “But never before have I seen someone _hack_ the placement examination. And you didn’t even have the decency be subtle in your cheating!”

“What?” Ratchet felt like his head was spinning. The administrator jabbed his finger in Ratchet’s face, then waved a datapad at him.

“I’ve seen a rare few prodigies get scores like this on their third _decade_ of placement examinations. You want me to believe you scored this on your first attempt.” The administrator held up the datapad, revealing a 360 digit hexedecimal string that represented Ratchet’s score on the various sections of the practical exam. Ratchet stared in shock. He hadn’t...had the AI administering the test failed? That was way too high. Sure, he’d thought the test was easier than he’d expected. And he’d finished startlingly early. But that wasn’t a graduate score. It simply wasn’t possible.

“I...” Ratchet floundered. “I don’t know. I didn’t cheat, sir. I wouldn’t have the first idea how to hack the examination protocol. Maybe there was a glitch?”

“Well, of course you would say that.”

“What do you want me to do?” Ratchet asked, a tinge of frustration leaking into his voice. This bot had clearly woken up on the wrong side of the berth and was in serious need of an attitude adjustment. “Do you want me to retake the examination?”

“No, no, I think we should take it at face value. I’m going to have you under observation as you carry out your duties, so our faculty can make sure you don’t engage in any other acts of academic dishonesty and so they can judge your performance themselves. Given your _exceptional_ score, I will be acting as your faculty mentor myself. You can report to me before and after each shift.”

“Sir, this is really isn’t necessary.”

“Ratchet of Iacon Minor, you are lucky I have not stripped you of your placement entirely! There is plenty of need for bots like you—unexceptional, unethical, insouciant—disassembling frames in the city morgue. You will prove yourself worthy of the score you gamed your way into or I will find excuse to assign you a better profession, more suiting to your temperament.”

It didn’t matter if it was fair. It was his word—the word of a unremarkable student with few friends and an admittedly bad attitude, against the word of his assigned mentor. He was just going to have to live with whatever indignities Panax found amusing until he tired of this little game.

Ratchet squeezed his hands into fists and then released. “Of course, Administrator. I will do my best to fulfill any duties you assign to me.”

 

* * *

 

There was a horrible grinding noise as Ratchet’s hand froze up into a contorted claw. With a snarl of frustration he slammed his hand onto the surgical slab and, when that didn’t succeed in loosening up the joint, he picked up the hammer he kept on the slab and gave it a good whack. That did the trick, except for one stubborn finger. Ratchet pressed his hand to the berth and spread his fingers to isolate just that one finger, then raised the hammer high.

“Uh, doc?” His patient was staring at him in wide-eyed terror. “What’s going on?”

“You got a defective medic, nothing to worry yourself about,” Ratchet explained, giving the obstinate finger another whack, and then two more just to be safe. He let out a small sigh of relief when it finally curled smoothly into a fist and flexed out, with only a little crackle of protest.

“Doesn’t that...hurt?” His patient asked, an unfortunate jet frametype with a laser burn through his wing whose name Ratchet had already forgotten.

Ratchet shrugged and picked up his scalpel again. “Nah, I cut of most of the sensation in my hands until I’m doing surgery. Unless you need that fine-grained feedback, the pain isn't really worth it.”

“That’s really fragged up, Doc,” the patient said. “Can’t you just fix them?”

“Kid, I only answer one stupid question per appointment. If you want to ask me anything else you’re going to have to get yourself shot up again,” he said as he opened the blockers on his sensornet and started surgery.

 

* * *

 

Ratchet pulled his hands close and waited for the floodgates to open and light his hands afire. The pain didn’t come. He realized abruptly that his optics were powered off.

Ratchet powered his optics on and looked slowly around the darkened room, trying to place himself. He must have been recharging. It always took him a few seconds to resolve his short term memory when he pulled himself out of recharge, and the intervening time was an anxious place. But the darkness above him was the bottom of a recharge berth, identical to the one he was lying on. The dim blue lighting was coming from the energon infuser on the wall and it lit the rest of the shuttle’s cabin well enough to place himself once the memories slotted into place.

The shuttle.

He was looking for Drift.

All of those other things...his form fatigue...that had been a long time ago. They were just memory purges; visual memory replays in response to lack of neural stimulus. ‘Dreams’, as Verity would have called them. They’d talked about dreams once, back on Earth. Ratchet had been fascinated to learn that humans generated entirely new experiences in their sleeping state, ‘sort of like movies’. He’d explained that while sometimes Cybertronians experienced states of unreality while they were in recharge or powersave mode, the memory purges they experienced were always just that—replays of memories as they’d lived them.

“So you have photographic memory? That is super cool,” she’d said.

“It starts degrading after a few million years,” Ratchet had said, even though he knew that to her ‘a few million years’ was basically the same as forever. “And I’d really rather not re-experience most of my life. I prefer a empty recharge cycle. It’s peaceful.”

“Yeah, I guess most of your life is kind of like an anxiety dream,” she’d said, and then had to explain what _those_ were.

She wasn’t wrong.

He’d gone years without dreaming before this trip, but ever since _Drift_ and his fragged memory time-capsule, he’d been fragging cursed. Just one more thing to add to the list of things to yell at Drift about once he eventually found the bot.

Ratchet swung his legs over the side of the berth with a groan and detached the fuel and charging leads. The search wasn’t going great. The entirety of known space was very big. Drift and his one tiny shuttle were very small. And since Drift wasn’t answering any hails and had disabled his on-board tracking, Ratchet didn’t have a lot to go on.

He coiled up the fuel line and closed up the infuser case, then shuffled out of the tiny berthroom and into the access corridor of the shuttle. Cockpit to the fore, cargo to the rear, engine access belowdecks and the hab space curled around the center hallway. Once he finally found Drift it was going to be a bit cramped, but a lot less so than the shuttle Drift had been sent off with. That was a single-person scout shuttle, _theoretically_ not even capable of storing enough fuel to make more than a two system jaunt without refueling. Given that, you’d think someone at one of the local fueling depots would have seen him.

Ratchet slid into the captain’s chair and put his feet up. He checked his location on the console, not more than an hour’s flight away from the nearest space station. He didn’t expect he’d get any good intel at Station...LO9, but if he didn’t stop at every space station between him and Drift he wasn’t going to be able to include “I stopped at every space station between the Lost Light and here looking for your miserable aft” in his list of complaints.

He wasn’t searching the _entirety_ of known space, thankfully. It had taken far too long for Ratchet to remember that the shuttles had on-board tracking that should have been accessible from the Lost Light—by the time he’d thought to check, Drift’s signal had gone dark. Either disabled or out of range or some worse fate he was refusing to consider. But as he was packing to leave, he’d realized that someone might have thought to check Drift’s location before he fell off the map. Someone, specifically Perceptor.

Percy had been serious-faced when Ratchet first stepped into his lab to ask about Drift. He’d been busy researching the impact of the timecase. Ratchet suspected he was reluctant to talk about the first of his two friends who’d betrayed his trust through the secrets they’d kept. It had been a big betrayal, Drift being involved with the Overlord conspiracy. For Perceptor especially. It would have been for any of the Wreckers who’d been to Garrus 9, but Percy had always been close to Drift.

But when he’d explained his intention to retrieve Drift, Percy surprised him by already being on the same page. “You’re right,” he’d said. “The captain should have sent someone to find him a long time ago. The moment he confessed, we should have at least sent out word that Drift was welcome back.”

“Well, maybe he figured news of his confession would spread and Drift would realize he was welcome back without him having to say anything,” Ratchet said, though he was loathe to defend Rodimus on this of all subjects.

Percy shook his head. “Are we talking about the same mech? Drift runs away from his problems and he doesn’t look back. Wherever he is, I guarantee you he runs whenever he hear the word ‘Cybertron’, let alone ‘Autobot’.”

“I didn’t say it was sensible. Just saying it was something the captain might have thought to himself. They’re quite a pair.”

“Mm, I suppose,” Perceptor had agreed reluctantly. “So are you two.”

“Me and the captain? Pfft. We’ve got nothing in common. Anyway, the ship’s computer says the transponder in Drift’s shuttle is offline, or out of range or something. I was thinking, if there’s anyone who might have checked that signal before it went dark, that someone would be you.”

And Percy had smiled weakly and passed over a datastick full of coordinates—thirty-seven days worth. He’d wished Ratchet luck on his search with obvious sincerity, then reached out to take him by the hand. “Bring him home, okay?”

From the timestamps on the coordinate data, Percy must have started logging Drift’s location only days after his exile. Ratchet wondered what had been running through his head those first few days, whether he’d been convinced with all the rest of them that Drift was the sole conspirator. He wondered whether he’d tracked his location because of or in spite of that conviction. The data was meagre. Drift could have gone anywhere in the time afterwards. But it gave him somewhere to start. Someone somewhere along this path had to have seen Drift. Had to have talked to him. Had to know where he’d gone next.

Ratchet was too full from recharging to drink anything, but he ran out of things to do on the console and needed something to distract his hands. Ratchet didn’t cope well with boredom.

He reached for a tablet and stylus and picked up on his most recent sketching project; an illustration from memory of Hero riding on Thunderclash’s shoulders from back in his academy days. He figured Thunders would appreciate it as a gift next time he saw him. He’d be glad to see Ratchet hadn’t lost all of his art skills, he’d always been adamant that it was important to find private joys regardless of one’s circumstances. And with no crew to attend to and no updates forthcoming from First Aid there wasn’t much else to do except trawl the datanets for sightings of Drift, practice obscure medical procedures in simulation, and work on sketching.

He was just finishing up the shading on Thunders’ face when the computer’s nav system started beeping to alert him they were coming into docking range. He set everything aside and took up the helm, comming into station air control and getting permission to dock at one of the far-flung fueling ports designated for mechs. The sector of space he’d followed Drift into wasn’t exactly mech friendly. It was outside of Galactic Council purview and none of the competing empires or consortiums had laid claim to it. It was no man's land, just the struggling fringes of inhabited space. Not many of the planets had been touched by the war, but it was still best not to show one’s face as a Cybertronian if you wanted people to open up to you.

Now, as a hologram of a human...technically someone might someday call him on humans not being indigenous species to this sector of the galaxy. But generally folks just assumed he was some sort of uncommon bipedal organic they weren’t well acquainted with. There were more than enough species that had been reduced to small migrant populations that it wasn’t uncommon to see an organic and wonder if you’d ever seen another member of that species and not be entirely sure. Ratchet wished he’d taken the time at some point to actually sit down and study organic evolution to try and figure out if there was some common ancestor or if it was some sort of convergent evolution that led to so many species being roughly bipedal and human-shaped.

He cozied himself into the pilot’s chair and made sure all the engines were ramped down and properly docked before materializing the holoform. The abrupt cut of sensation in his real body as it transferred to the holoform was as disconcerting as ever, but he was getting more used to it. Even if there wasn’t a political bias against Cybertronians, most of these organic-frequented space stations were so damned tiny that he couldn’t have gotten far in his real body.

He shook out his arms and checked out his outfit. You would _think_ , given Brainstorm’s explanation of the technology involved, that the avatars would materialize every time looking exactly the same. Ratchet found he oscillated through a variety of cozy-looking sweaters and pants in colors that never matched. He wasn’t sure if the point was that he was unfashionable or that he was boring. Annoying either way, the outfit never did blend well with space station fashion.

He messed with the holoform controls a little bit, testing his solidity and opacity to make sure he could pass and interact with solid matter. There was even a tinge of sensation—enough that you could tell when someone tapped you on the shoulder or if you’d dropped something, not the same as true touch. That all accomplished, he grabbed the bag he’d purchased a few stations back and made sure all his stuff was packed up before heading for the airlock.

The airlock opened into the seal-tube, which led him to the elevator and then into the shuttle-bay lobby. He flagged down one of the shuttle-bay attendants and paid for a few hours of parking in return for a ticket that’d allow him to access the correct elevator on the way out. The attendant looked through his bag with a raised brow ridge but none of his possessions were contraband, they were just a bit...peculiar. They let him on through.

Once he was out on the main floor of the space station, he made his way to the first station map he could find. Ratchet didn’t especially like space stations, there was no reason to waste time being lost. Make a plan, in and out. He grabbed the download link for the station map and pulled it off the station network, then used his HUD to mark up the relevant bits. First things first, he’d hit the community billboards on the main floor.

They were 3D hologram boards, a little more high tech then what they used on the Lost Light. These were the sort that you could wander through and interact with, not just tap the posts to get more information. Ratchet went to the upload port and plugged in his datastick, then scrolled through all fourteen menus to get his flyer posted to the board. Once it pinged cheerfully at him, he walked in to locate his flier and rearrange it somewhere close to eye level for most of the passersby.

Now, Ratchet was no artist. But his design was certainly eye-catching—this was a fact, not an opinion. He’d gotten nearly two hundred replies to the relevant subspace frequency, it’s just that all of them had either been duds, prank calls or so vague as to be useless. At the top, he had _“MISSING : REWARD”_ in block letters, then a still image of Drift he’d pulled from Rewind’s travelogue. Drift was at his least threatening looking—he’d tried to pick a picture that softened up the swordsmech so people weren’t scared away. It was him asleep on the shuttle back from Hedonia, leaning against Ratchet’s shoulder—though Ratchet had been careful to crop himself out of the image. His caption had also been crafted for maximal nonthreateningness: _“Lost my friend, he goes by the name Drift. 12 meters standard, red & white Cybertronian, probably engaging in errant heroism, very irritating. Any tips helpful!”_

Ratchet didn’t like missing persons searches. Especially not solo, sprawled across an entire Galactic Sector without military backup. The thing he disliked the most was that, inevitably, you were forced to rely on outside help. He couldn’t just hold up a sword and ask Primus to guide him to Drift’s location. He didn’t have a sword, for one thing, and Primus wasn’t real. If Drift wasn’t being an aft he could have called him over subspace or pinged his coordinates. With both of those option ruled out he had no choice but to ask people for help.

Ratchet hated asking for help.

He hit the rest of the ground floor bulletin boards to post up his flyer, then sent up the liftpad to the second floor to see if his flyer was still showing up on the paid advertising screens in the lift. He’d only paid for a ten second slot, because he was cheap and he was pretty sure nobody looked at the advertising screens anyway because they were ninety percent advertisements for sleazy engine boosters and what looked like salespitches for various cults. He had to ride the damned thing for ten minutes before his little flyer popped up on the screen. Then he was on the upper promenade, walking the storefronts and trying to pick a victim to snag out of the crowd. Eventually he settled on one of the janitorial staffers, a fellow with four upper appendages and a red fin sticking out of his head. Ratchet gave him a little wave to snag his attention as he wandered over.

“Hey, could I have just a minute?” Ratchet said, smoothing down the fabric of his pants. They weren’t real, so that really didn’t do much for the wrinkles.

The alien propped his mop on his shoulder and gave Ratchet’s holoform an unimpressed stare, but nodded him on. Both Ratchet and the janitor were wearing standard issue translators, so Ratchet wasn’t expecting any major communication difficulties.

“I’m just passing through,” he said, “and I’ve been looking for a friend. He’s been missing for a couple of months. Do you know, where is the best place to go on this station to find people who’ve got the station-to-station gossip?”

The janitor scratched his chin with the tip of his tapered arm-like appendage. “Well, depends what sort of gossip you want, really. But finding folks, I figure that probably goes to Xex. She runs a fortune telling stall at the end of the way, it’s a chain run by her and all of her clone siblings. They run a little side-gig doing private eye bullshit. That’d be my first guess.”

“Thanks,” Ratchet said. _Hit on the first one, what do you know, I’m not entirely unlucky after all._ It was just the fragging dreams that were making him feel that way. A few weeks of fruitless searching wasn’t unexpected. Sure, it’d have been nice to fly into the first station he’d passed by and get out of his shuttle and see Drift there, waiting for him, all packed to go. But that was an obvious fantasy. Drift had been doing something all this time. He wasn’t just waiting around for Ratchet to show up and bring him home. Why would he be? Maybe those first few weeks Drift had hoped for a surprise rescue. Those first few weeks were a long time ago now.

Ratchet consulted his map and located the ‘fortunes and energy readings’ stall pretty quickly. Why the frag was every species in the galaxy as gullible as a box of Tailgates?

There was a bell hanging from the door, and it chimed cheerily as Ratchet stepped inside. The space was small, with criss-crossing lights illuminating a elaborately painted floor in various candy colors. In the back of the room, there was an alcove with at least ten security monitors and a figure wrapped in a fluffy white cloak perched on a high stool. Ratchet nooded respectfully in their direction. “Xex? I was told you might have information I was looking for.”

Xex waved him over. “Oh, come in, come in,” she said, laughter in her voice. Ratchet walked over to her, eyeing the weird patterns on the floor warily as he went. Up close Xex was ninety percent cloak; her visible goggles, nose and fingertips peeking out from underneath were a uniform bright pink. She was tiny, even compared to holoform Ratchet.

Xex wiggled her finger to draw him closer. “What were you looking for, dear?” she asked. “I can, of course, do a general reading to suss out your personal energies. If you preferred a deeper reading, that could also be provided.”

“It’s Ratchet, actually, not ‘dear’. And I wasn’t looking for metaphysical information. I heard you’ve got contacts across a few of these stations?”

“My sisters, yes,” Xex said. “So you’re here for the gossipmonger, not the spiritualist. And what are you hoping I might know?”

“It’s easier to show you.”

Ratchet shrugged his bag off his shoulder and stooped to uncinch the top. He pulled his figurine of Drift out and cradled it in his arms for a moment. At human-scale, the doll that was barely the side of his hand was rather more unwieldy. He kicked the bag aside and held out the figurine.

“I’m looking for a Cybertronian, a friend of mine. He looks like this. Except bigger. A lot bigger.”

She chuckled. “That’s...quite the demonstration. I haven’t heard of any Cybertronians passing through this station, but I can message my sisters and see if they’ve seen anything. Whatever did you ask the salesman when you bought that thing?”

“I got it from another friend. I can provide digital reference files for you, if that’d be helpful?”

“Well, we get so few Cybertronians in this corner of the galaxy I can’t really imagine mixing him up with a _different_ enormous killer robot,” Xex said dryly. “No offense.”

“Of course not,” Ratchet said, equally dry. Feeling a bit awkward now, he grabbed his bag and stuffed his armful of Drift back out of sight. “Do you have any contacts outside of your sisters?”

“A professional doesn’t divulge her secrets.” Xex said. “But yes, of course. We’ve got an in with the workers union in shuttle repairs. They travel to rescue or salvage any damaged craft in the sector, which is an excellent way to pick up on secrets. And we’ve got a few staff members on payroll at each of the stations. I assume you have reason to believe this...what’s its name?”

“Drift. His name is Drift. And yes, I have one lead, and its that I know he passed through this sector a number of months ago.”

“And what is the nature of your...friendship?”

“I fail to see how that is in any way relevant.”

“Mm, simply curious how a...can’t say as I know your species at a glance. But it certainly seems an unlikely friendship, especially for you to be pursuing this Drift alone across the galaxy.”

“Maybe so,” Ratchet said, crossing his arms across his chest and scowling. _Don’t scare the alien off, Ratchet. She can’t help being nosy, it’s literally her job._

“Well, it will be a few days before I hear back from the entire network, I assume you won’t be staying long at the station?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Alright, well, I’ll need a subspace frequency to contact you once we know. And my standard fees apply.”

“And what would those be?” Ratchet asked.

“Well, generally, I say 15 credits base, plus ten for any additional hour of legwork. But I think I’d prefer to do a reading for you.”

“What?”

“Don’t complain, you’d be getting your favor for fee. And in exchange, all you have to do is stand there and let me tell you what the lights tell me about your inner energies.”

“No. I’ve got the credits.”

“Mm, I don’t think I accept your credits,” Xex said. “I want payment in you putting up with my metaphysical bullshit. Not to be petty, but your disdain is rolling off your aura in _waves_. Let me have my fun and I’ll help you find your friend.”

Ratchet heaved a sigh and stooped to grab his bag. “Whatever. If it makes you happy. No touching, though.”

“Oh, no need. I’m not some kinetics reader or any of that frippery nonsense. I prefer to go back to the basics, shadowplay.”

“ _What?_ “ It might have been that Ratchet’s eyes bulged a trifle out of their sockets.

Xex grabbed one of the monitors and turned it towards him. “Oh, have you heard of it? Shadowplay is the interpretation of how your shadow, as an extension of your body, interplays with the seven holy circles on the floor when you cross the play. I just have to run the security tape of you coming in and then I’ve got an automated algorithm that records the points of intersection. Wait a second, I’ll set it to run.” She grabbed a keyboard out from under one of the monitors and dragged it into her lap and began tapping away at it.

Ratchet watched as the video of him walking across the room played back slowly, bits of the intertwined circles on the floor lighting up as his twinned shadows slid across them. When the recording ended, the rest of the image disappeared, the brightened circle segments left glowing against a black background. Xex hummed, flitting her finger over the screen. “Ah, interesting. Very interesting. You carry yourself like someone much larger than you are. You’ve got a solidity and grounding to your steps, it reflects a deep connection to your home planet. You were born on a planet, I assume, and not a space station.”

“Yeah,” Ratchet admitted. “Long way from here.”

“I’m sure.” She clucked at the image, tapping at three green circle segments. Ratchet had no idea what the colors were supposed to mean, but they certainly meant something to Xex. “Oh dear. You’re mourning a loss, a terrible loss. You carry a weight in your soul that you’ve never been able to throw off.”

_Well that was probably true for half the people in the galaxy. See, that was how they did it. Keep it vague, keep it portentous, make sure it could be true for just about anyone._

“You’re tired,” Xex pronounced. “You’re haunted by things you did...no. You’re haunted by things you didn’t do.” She nodded sharply. “And those regrets keep you from sleeping.”

_Probably reading little microexpressions, noticed me respond to what she said and responded on the fly._

“And your biggest regret is that you allowed yourself to be separated from your love. Oh, I can see your shadow reaching out for them across the circles. Your love is strong.”

Ratchet snorted. “Yeah, right.”

She smiled at him, a mouthful of jagged teeth like broken glass. “If you don’t love him, why are you trying to find him?”

“I could be hunting him down to get revenge. I could have left some important possession with him. You don’t _know_ anything,” Ratchet said.

“Cross-species romance, always such a fragile thing. Treasure your time together, for it will pass all too soon.”

“We’re not together. That’s the problem. Wait, no, that’s not what I meant. I meant that we’re physically separated and that I’d very much like you to hurry this along so I can keep searching for the bot who I like _only as a friend._ “

“Very well.” She ran her hand in an ellipse along the field of lights. “Your spirit is out of balance. You’ve held yourself too close for too long and now you’ve lurched into something you do not understand. Do not be afraid to let go in order to regain your balance.” She snapped her gaze back over to Ratchet and smiled. “And that will be all. Please enter your subspace frequency and relevant contact information into this form.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The flashbacks are going to be out of order throughout this story for a more chaotic/dreamlike feel, I really hope that doesn't make things too confusing? I know that's a big point of disambiguation from Observing Drift.
> 
> I love comments so feel free to tell me anything. You can also find me on tumblr at [ notwhelmedyet](http://notwhelmedyet.tumblr.com/), talking 'bout robots & being behind on lost light.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should probably warn y'all at some point that these first two chapters are way longer than most of the rest. So please don't be too disappointed next week. XD

“No.” Ratchet slammed his hand on the table and half of Autobot Command jumped. “Optimus, I need to talk to you. Outside.”

“We’ll be just a few minutes, everyone,” Optimus said, rising smoothly to his feet. He got to the door before Ratchet and opened the door to usher them outside. He turned to look at Ratchet, his arms crossed and a frown on his face. Not that you could see the frown under his damned faceplate, but Ratchet was an expert in reading Orion Pax body language. “Ratchet,” he started in a placating tone.

“Don’t you _Ratchet_ me,” Ratchet said. “Because it’s not going to work. This is wrong, Prime! Is that so hard to see? Making people—making people to die? It’s every sort of perversion we are fighting against.”

“We’re not going to force them into servitude. We’ll give the constructed mechs a chance to choose their faction.”

“Oh, will we?” Ratchet put his hands on the Prime’s shoulders, and pushed him down. Optimus crouched a bit, indulging Ratchet. Ratchet took the opportunity to lean into his face and spit out the bitter that had been burning inside him since this damned command meeting started. “So we’re going to build a mech on this spaceship and tell them there’s a war. And then we tell them they can pick which side they want to be on. Are we going to offer them safe passage away from the front lines? Are we going to ferry them over to the nearest Decepticon stronghold, if that’s what they choose? Don’t _lie_ to me, Prime. We’re an inch from destruction, from within or without. And I’d rather seen us blown to the pit than see you become like _him._ ”

“Ratchet. Please. We have no other options.”

Ratchet released his shoulders and threw up his hands. “Say the words! If you and the rest of command are going to vote me under, I want you to acknowledge what you’re doing. You are taking lives, real Cybertronian lives, and making them into your toy soldiers. And then you’ll throw them onto the battlefield. And then most of them will die, just like all the soldiers that came before them. But at least those other soldiers had a _choice_. They chose to become Autobots.”

“Yes, they did. We did.” Optimus leaned against the wall and sank down the rest of the way to rest on his heels. “We’re overrun, Ratchet. And Megatron is still killing innocent mechs, innocent organics, whole worlds in _our_ name. I know it’s unconscionable, to sacrifice lives who haven’t even lived. But these other species, other worlds that are caught up in our war...isn’t it it even more unconscionable to let them die?”

“There has to be another way,” Ratchet said, a sob catching in his throat. “There has to be some other way.”

“You don’t have to attend the vote,” Optimus said. “You can keep your hands clean of this decision, at least.”

“It’s a nice thought, Orion,” Ratchet said, kneeling down to settle his hands over Optimus’s. “But if we’re going down, we’re going down together. You can’t wash this clean.”

 

* * *

 

Ratchet checked over the readouts again. Sparks stable, still thawing. He walked the line of berths, tilted at oblique angles to help the chilled energon sink down to the lower extremities as the fuel pumps began to operate. There were four nurses assisting, the entirety the surviving medical staff on the Ark. Not counting the mad science crew, waiting in eager anticipation to see their creations take their first steps.

Walking was still pretty far away. One of the berth monitors pinged, a sign that the mech lying on the berth had finally triggered fuel pump initiation. Ratchet hurried over to the mech, generic armor that screamed infantry already painted a reassuringly Autobot blue. At least they hadn’t already put badges on them.

Ratchet held his scanner up to the mech’s opened chestplates, keeping an eye on the thawing progress. He’d never participated in cold creation before—back when there’d still been medical specialists, it had been the specialty of a particularly skeevy sort of medic. Ratchet had rather looked down on the whole thing: not a lot of skill involved, was there? The metallurgists assembling the frame, certainly. And the engineers who rigged up the internals, that was work. But the thawing specialists, who placed the sparks and oriented the cold constructed bots with consciousness? There hadn’t seemed to be much to it.

He’d certainly imagined a insufficient amount of terror and wonder in the whole process. As the spark began to thaw and the fuel pump began to work, draining the feed lines they’d staged, the mech tethered to the slab _became_ a mech, a hastily assembled frame and pile of parts transforming into a person with an intangible certainty Ratchet couldn’t have explained.

Ratchet fed out a spool of direct uplink cable and hooked it to the mech’s helm, then to his own. They dropped out of the physical together, Ratchet’s consciousness standing firm in the darkness facing an amorphous scattered potential of a person.

It was an unsettling image, the mech he was trying to pull into personhood by brute force. _This mech should be given weeks to orient to the essentials of life. He should be given time to be a newframe and discover existence on his own terms._ There simply wasn’t time. Ratchet had read that early cold construction projects had onlined mechs via AI simulations, but he just couldn’t stomach the thought. A mech ought to be greeted into the world by another mech, they ought to be welcomed with the warmth of another’s spark, they ought to...

He offered across his knowledge of language and gave the mech time to integrate it. They’d need further study to fully grasp the nuances of speech and the world around them, Ratchet would have to provide that via data upload. Later.

In the now, he watched the mech create for themselves a self-image. They’d never seen their own frame and Ratchet was their only frame of reference, so the image necessarily imitated his. Like mimicry in the early development stages. The mech frowned.

“We are the same,” He said.

“We’re both Cybertronians, yes,” Ratchet said.

“Then why did you exist before now and I just began?” The mech asked.

“Your core—your spark—was frozen. Waiting. We built you a body so that you could wake up.”

The mech nodded and touched his hand over where his spark was. “It was cold, but now it burns.”

“That’s normal,” Ratchet said. “You’ll get used to it.”

“Who are you?” He asked.

“My name is Ratchet. I’m a medic—I heal people.”

“What’s my name?”

“You don’t have one yet,” Ratchet said. “We pick our own names. You’ll choose one that’s right for you.”

“Being a medic, healing people...that’s your purpose, right? That’s why you exist. And now you’ve woken me up, because you wanted me to exist.”

_Oh no._ Ratchet could see the gears turning, but there was no way to redirect this first fragile conversation away from the inevitable question.

“What’s _my_ purpose?”

 

* * *

 

“He said no. What are you going to do, Prowl, court martial the mech?” Ratchet pinched the bridge of his nose, all too aware of the door at his back and the room of waiting MTOs within. A whole cohort of them and only one who’d rejected Optimus’s pitch to join the front lines as an Autobot soldier. Their first conscientious objector—Ratchet had expected this showdown to happen weeks ago.

“If necessary,” Prowl said. Optimus shook his head and Prowl turned on him. “If we allow this mech to duck out of military service, we could have an insurrection on our hands. What if all of them follow his lead? We can’t normalize this.”

“You know, I considered the Autobot army’s handling of deserters to be one of its moral victories over the Decepticons,” Optimus observed mildly. “ _We_ don’t convert our soldiers into weapons in reprisal for cowardice. We do not hunt down our deserters and end their lives. We are here because we pledged to the cause. If—what was their name?”

“Gimbal,” Ratchet said.

“Right. If Gimbal says that he cannot take a life and we cannot afford the resources for him to leave the ship we shall simply have to find him an alternate assignment. I think I recall Ratchet complaining the other day about our high medic casualty rate?”

“Oh no, you aren’t shoving him off on me,” Ratchet said. “I do not have time to train new medics, coordinate the entire medical division, run this harebrained MTO project and do my actual job all at the same time.”

“You’re not thinking this through, Prime,” Prowl protested. “Think about it strategically.”

“I fail to see how becoming a medic is the sort of sinecure that would cause a general revolt among our new recruits,” Optimus said. “As you were recounting the other day in your report, we’ve got a thirty percent attrition rate for medic placements in front-line outposts. The Decepticons have repeatedly and _systematically_ targeted our medical corps. The placement allows Gimbal and any future conscientious objectors to go without violating their convictions at considerable risk to their own lives.”

“I think,” Prowl said through gritted denta, “that telling soldiers they don’t need to fight is an excellent way to defang the entire army.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Optimus said.

 

* * *

 

There was a knock at the door and then Orion spoke. “Ratchet? Are you in there?”

Ratchet propped himself up on his elbows and said, “You can come in—the door’s not locked.”

Orion cracked the door open and slipped inside, face pinched in a frown. “Not locked? Ratchet, we’re only feet outside of Dead End, you can’t be leaving your door unlocked. Why are you laying on the ground?”

“Tired,” Ratchet said, dramatically throwing his arm over his face. “I’m glad I got assigned to medical, because I’m clearly _not_ made for construction work.”

Orion surveyed the room and all of Ratchet’s hard work. The walls and floor he’d stripped down and scrubbed, though some of the stains hadn’t been within his power to remove. New light fixtures. Some surgical berths he’d scooped up from the hospital’s recycling and spent most of the day sanitizing and then restoring to some shadow of their former glory. The life support system was most of the way done and he had unopened crates stacked in jumbled piles around that project, ready to be sorted into the cabinets.

“It looks like your project’s coming along,” Orion said, sitting down on the floor next to him and offering over a cannister of engex, the kind with the blue label that supercooled when you popped the top open. “I thought you might be thirsty. Want to share?”

“Thanks.” Ratchet pushed himself up to sit and took the proffered can. Orion was diplomatic enough to not ask when Ratchet had last refueled, which was good—Ratchet really had no idea. He’d gone straight from the hospital to here and he couldn’t remember taking a fueling break during his past shift. He took a sip and considered that _maybe_ he was actually underfueled instead of tired.

Or maybe both.

“But really, you can’t treat this clinic like your apartment or even the hospital. The people here are desperate, Ratchet—you can’t just leave your door open.”

“Do you really think I’d be able to get anyone to trust me if I tried to lock them in?”

Orion shrugged. “There’s nobody else offering them free medical care, I imagine they’d take what they could get.”

Ratchet passed the can over and tried to scrub the tiredness off his face. “Honestly, I forgot. I’ll try to remember and keep it locked until it opens, but once I start taking patients I don’t want anyone feeling trapped.”

“Do you need help on anything? It’s a bit grungy, isn’t it?” Orion asked, gesturing towards the greying walls.

“They’re clean, they’re just not pretty.” Ratchet considered his mental to-do list. “I could use your help on the ceiling-mounted stuff. It’s hard to hold them in place while you do the wiring.”

It was later, when they were already hard at work, Ratchet balancing on top of a berth to poke his head up into the ceiling wiring, that Orion voiced what had obviously been heavy on his mind.

“I’m sorry for not being there for you, after Anodyne left. I should have made the time.” Orion shifted his weight to he could hold the mount for the claw and look at Ratchet.

“It was fine,” Ratchet said, looking away. “I was fine. And you were busy.”

“You were not fine,” Orion said. “And that’s okay, you know? You seem like you’re doing better now? I walked in and you looked like Ratchet again.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Ratchet said. “I’ve been wallowing, I admit it. I needed a project. Thanks for talking me into the clinic.”

“Hey, I just said that buying someplace to do this _outside_ of your apartment would be a good idea. The rest of this is all you. I think it’s great, by the way. The government lets people slip through the cracks, who better to fish those people back out than the Chief Medical Officer of the Prime himself? There’s a sort of poetic justice to it.”

“I don’t really think of myself like that.” Ratchet pulled away and ducked back out of the ceiling, shaking some dust off his hands. “Okay, I think we’re set to test it.

“You’ll get used to it,” Orion said, seriously. “Being CMO, I mean. I’m sure it blindsided you, but you deserve it. You’re amazing at what you do.”

“It’s a job,” Ratchet said. “I can’t say I’m enamoured with the title. What I want to do, as Ratchet, is finish setting this up so I can go out for a drink with a friend. So how about we do a little less of the chit-chat?”

 

* * *

 

Ratchet spat something black onto the floor below him, vents shuddering. _Frag. That was the filtration system burst somewhere._ He wiped his mouth of with the back of his hand and pressed a hand to the dent in his side. He’d been thrown clear when the explosion burst through the hull of the ship, but his impact against the row of steel berths had clearly done more damage than he’d assessed initially.

“Have you gotten the blast doors down yet?” He shouted across the room at one of the soldiers milling about at the far side of the carnage. The wind was still roaring out of the room, techs scrambling to set up a force field to slow their loss of pressurized air. They’d already magnetized the floor to keep any more casualties from being dragged out of the ship but if the emergency blast doors weren’t lowered, Ratchet had no way of accessing any of his supplies from in the medibay.

“No! We need another five minutes!” The soldier shouted back.

Ratchet looked down at the patient in his arms. _Five minutes. If I got him hooked up to life support right now..._

_Triage._

“I’m sorry, Auxi,” Ratchet said, squeezing the medtech’s hand. “I’m not going to be able to...”

“I know,” Auxi whispered. “Sorry. I should have been faster.”

“Don’t—”

But Auxi had already slipped away, his spark shrinking out of sight. Ratchet set his body aside and crawled towards the next patient. Leaking fast, lines in the leg ruptured on a piece of shrapnel and not properly cauterized. Luckily unconscious, which made what he was going to have to do simpler.

No damned replacement lines on hand, of course. But Auxi’s body was right there. Ratchet unfolded his hand to access the scalpel and crawled back over to drag the empty frame closer. Auxi was a standard MTO frameset, the parts should be compatible. Left leg, above the knee, detach the front panel to access the fuel lines within. Ratchet placed a clamp at the top of the patient’s hip to slow the loss of fuel and then pulled the metal spike free. Cut lines, clean the suture point and then glue in place, surgical mesh over the patch. Two minutes at most and then he was crawling again, dragging Auxi’s frame along with him.

The whistling had stopped. Someone must have finally gotten the hole sealed. The next patient was not slipping fast enough to need immediate assistance. He kept moving towards the search and rescue bot who’d caught a face full of shrapnel. This one was awake and shivering in pain, one metal fragment clean through his optic. Ratchet got his scanner out of his hip compartment and hooked it up, checking for actual vital signs, ignoring the registered pain. That was _irrelevant._ The only thing that mattered right now was fixing whoever he could save.

“You’re not in serious danger right now, but you’re going into shock,” Ratchet said, putting a comforting hand on the mech’s shoulder. “I’m going to use a small EM pulse to force you into standby mode so you’re out of pain, okay? I’ll be back to fix you as soon as I can.”

The mech nodded, fuel dribbling down their face from the cracked optic.

Ratchet did it, relaxing when the mech’s face turned slack and he finally stopped shivering. Ratchet started coughing again, black spatters on the patient’s body and on his hands, over the layer of Auxi’s cooling fuel that had coated his arms up to the elbows.

 

* * *

 

“Hey, kid, don’t look so nervous,” Ratchet said, crossing his arms. The mech he’d selected out of the new MTO trainees to fill the role of CMO’s assistant looked incredibly edgy. “I’m sure you’ve heard rumors and—yes, I am disagreeable. But only with people that deserve it. Do the work and we’re not going to have a problem. What’s your name?”

“Auxi,” The newly painted medic said, shifting on his feet. “Is it true you only picked an assistant because the Prime _ordered_ you to?”

“Ah, we’ve got a rumormonger among us,” Ratchet growled. The kid flinched and Ratched rolled his optics. “It’s a joke, Auxi. Yeah, I wasn’t big on the idea of getting another assistant. I don’t need _assisting_ , but the Prime, he worries. Not that any of that is something you have to be concerned with.” He waved Auxi towards his desk and pulled over an extra seat. They sat down.

“So how long have you been online?” He asked, keeping it casual. He’d have to figure out what this mech had learned in the training program at some point but Auxi looked ready to jump out of his frame if he started quizzing him on neurex saturate dosages.

“One week,” Auxi said, clasping his hands awkwardly.

Ratchet shook his head. _A week. A fragging week? What were they supposed to know in a week?_ “Are they doing the whole training program with data downloads, or did you at least get to work on a simulation?”

“Uh, the last two days we did surgical simulation, then before we got passed they had us dissect an empty and prove we knew where everything was. It may be short, but it was _intensive_ ,” Auxi said defensively.

“I don’t doubt you worked hard, it’s just hard to fathom learning that fast—I’m old school. Old, old school. I may yet crumble away into pure sentio metallico as I now sit here from pure old age and—and you don’t even know what that is, do you?”

“Umm...”

“Okay, you’re just going to have to learn over my shoulder. You can learn a lot at the elbow of a good medic, you know.” Ratchet scribbled a bit on his datapad and wrote a note to remind himself to make a call down to the thawing department and figure out what in the pit was going on with his medical corps recruits. He was expecting trainees, but the key word in trainee was ‘train’ and a week of sims practice and data downloads was hardly enough to cope on the front line.

Auxi fidgeted. “Hey, Doctor Ratch—oh slag, that’s not right. Medic Ratchet? What do people call you?”

“CMO, but people only tend to call me that when they’re asking me to shoulder new and deeply time-consuming responsibilities. Ratchet is fine.” He gave the young mech an encouraging nod. “What was it you wanted to ask me?”

“The empties we used for our examination—do you know where they came from?”

“Soldiers, mostlike. Some bots you can’t fix and not everyone is religious. And then, some folks just don’t much care what happens to their frame after. They donate them back to the medical corps, we use them for transplants and teaching and all that.”

“Is there an official form or anything?” Auxi asked.

Ratchet snorted. “They really didn’t cover anything with you kids. Yeah, we keep a database of people who sign up as donors. It’s opt-in, so if they didn’t tell you anything, you shouldn’t be on the list.”

“Can you change that? Can you let them know, if anything happens, that I’d want that? I don’t want my frame to be drifting alone in space or sunk underground—if I can save someone, I want that.”

“I feel you, kid,” Ratchet said, patting him on the shoulder. “That’s my philosophy too.”

 

* * *

 

Ratchet stood at the end of the table and looked at the parts he’d laid neatly to rest. Meters of fuel line, barely used. A nearly complete strut system sorted by body region. Outer plating greyed in death and stripped of any exterior finish. A hundred sundry parts of what had used to be a person, a shattered fuel pump in his hands. He set it down on the table with a clank that echoed in the empty autopsy room.

A sliver of light arced across the wall, then vanished with a clank of the door. “Ratchet,” Optimus said, voice heavy. “I heard what happened. I’m so sorry.”

“I’ll be back on shift in just a minute,” Ratchet said, digging his fingers into the edge of the autopsy table.

“There are other medics. We can talk for a bit,” Optimus said.

“There’s nothing to talk about. It’s a war. People die. It’s what he was made for, isn’t it?” Ratchet said. He went over to the far wall and started opening cabinets for their spare parts storage. Body parts were stacked and coiled and sat neatly in rows, waiting to become needful. Ratchet went back to the table and picked up a pile of plating, emphatically not making eye contact with Optimus. He turned his back and went to the cabinets, sorting each of them into their component shelves. “That was the last one, by the way.”

Optimus, who’d had the grace to not try and argue with Ratchet, spoke softly. “The last what?” Like he was trying to placate some wild turbofox. It was almost funny. Ratchet wasn’t angry. He’d spent some time trying to muster up the energy earlier, staring at the bits and pieces of what had been Auxi, to no avail. He was just empty. Numb. He felt like his spark had been hollowed out.

“You’re not going to assign me any more assistants.” Ratchet looked over at Optimus. “I can’t take it anymore. Assign me a team of nurses. Make good on your threat about the security detail. I can’t mentor another newframe and break him down into spare parts. Do you know what was special about Auxi?” Ratchet asked.

“I don’t,” the Prime said. “What was it?”

“Nothing.” Ratchet waved at the parts on the table. “There was nothing special about him. He was uninteresting and generic in every way because he _died_ before he even started living. So stop giving me assistants, Prime, because they’re killing me.”

 

* * *

 

Ratchet rolled over on his berth, grabbing at the charging line and throwing it onto the floor in a clatter. He struggled with the fuel lead and then dumped that cable on the floor as well. It landed with a satisfying clunk. Ratchet pillowed his head on his arms and groaned. He felt more tired than he had before he’d laid down to recharge, which was unfair. Not nearly as unfair as the fact his brain had decided to hyperfixate on and force him to relive Auxi’s death for the third time in as many recharge cycles, but still. If he didn’t feel exhausted after there’d have been some case to argue it was _worth it._

“Thanks brain,” he grumbled into his arms. Then he pushed himself up and sat on the side of his berth for a few long minutes, trying to calm his body, half-convinced it was back three million years ago and a few minutes out from a firefight. He still felt wobbly when he forced himself to his feet. He forced himself coil up the cables and put them away and clean up the floor where a bit of energon had splattered. He closed the infuser case and knocked his fist against the latch, the click of the magnets catching under his hand.

_No point in sitting in the dark and feeling sorry for yourself. It’s beyond pathetic._ Ratchet almost wished he’d brought someone along with him on this fool’s errand. He hadn’t been alone this long...well he was having a hard time visualizing when that might have happened. Normally he would have enjoyed the solitude, but his brain seemed intent on treating the entire damned trip like a hostage situation.

Ratchet headed to the cockpit and where the med station was situated. There was a fold-down berth and a portable surgical station and, more relevant to his interests, a limited range of diagnostic equipment. Ratchet was losing patience with ‘waiting things out’. Time to move onto looking to see if there was any possible physiological causes for his...condition.

Fifteen minutes later and Ratchet had run through every possible cause for recharge disturbances he could think of and found zilch. Even a cerebroscan turned up nothing, though the fragged-damn computer did feel the need to inform him he had ‘elevated stress levels’ before he chucked it across the room. The thought he might have damaged the equipment sobered him up a bit and he went to collect it and ran a system diagnostic before pronouncing it fine. He put all the equipment he’d dragged out away with the sort of deliberate slowness that came of restraining the overwhelming urge to throw something or hit something or hit himself or do anything destructive. Once everything was boxed up he paced the ship for ten laps, controlling his ventilations and trying to get himself back under control.

“You’re stressed and you’re frustrated and you’re _not going to do anything stupid_ ,” he reminded himself. Again.

_If Rung was here..._ he wasn’t technically out of range, if he wanted to send a message back to the ship. But wouldn’t that be pathetic, admitting he’d utterly fallen apart after giving up his position just from a few memory purges and a little isolation. Rung wouldn’t judge him, at least not to his face. But he couldn’t...he was going to handle this by himself. He’d go back after he found Drift.

Speaking of—Ratchet plonked himself down in the command chair and went through the motions of his normal search routine. He’d gotten bored of searching through all the publicly posted law enforcement publications for the relevant keywords (sword, cybertronian, blade, swords) within the first few weeks and had taught himself how to program a few net crawlers to do the data trawling for him. Which, on the bright side, shortened the amount of time he had to spend squinting a the tiny screen. On the downside, it shortened the amount of time he had anything productive to do each day.

Nothing on the arrests crawler. Nothing on suspicious sightings or warrants. He had another thirty messages from random weirdos in response to his posted ads and it didn’t take nearly long enough to sift through all of them and decide every single one was a dead end. For half a second he thought he had a lead on a gossip thread, but it turned out to be a much smaller mechanical species. His crawler on publicly posted videos and images always turned up a few probable matches that he got to sort through—there was a pretty funny video of what looked to be some sort of organic in armor doing sword tricks on a hoverboard, but none of the ‘matches’ could have been mistaken for Drift even if he squinted.

“How does nobody take a video of the giant showy robot with thirty seven swords?” Ratchet grumbled.

He still hadn’t heard back from Xex or any of the other gossip networks he’d put a contract out with. Which was _fine_. He didn’t want to talk to that space charlatan anyway. _Do not be afraid to let go in order to regain your balance._ Yeah, sure. Just let go of his brain, that’d definitely solve the dreaming problem. He didn’t need anyone prying into his head or his business.

Ratchet checked his position against his starmaps and ran a few simulations to see when he’d next be making landing. The results weren’t especially encouraging. The bit of space he was traveling through was one of those inevitable blank spots between the more heavily populated bits, equidistant from anywhere interesting in all directions. He’d have to find something to do to keep himself entertained.

He paced the ship again.

When he sat back down, he decided to go through some old medical casefiles and play at solving a few medical mysteries. After a few minutes he realized that he must have gone through those files at some point earlier and forgotten it, because he kept guessing the right diagnosis before he finished reading the patient symptoms.

He sulked for a few minutes.

Then he got the thought to check the net for some _new_ medical mysteries. There were a few cybertronian social networks that weren’t divided by factions, which Ratchet had never joined because he had better things to do than waste his time. After a few minutes of searching they yielded up a happy pile of self-diagnosed conditions and self-reported symptoms in a host of discussion threads. It took awhile to load them over subspace, but once he sat down to work on them he managed to occupy himself for several hours.

But most of the cases were _too easy_ and he felt himself losing focus only a few hours in. He could run through a holo surgery sim, but he’d been doing that right before he went into recharge last and he couldn’t even pretend that he needed the practice.

He got up and moved his way to the cargo area of the shuttle and set up his targets to work on his sharpshooting instead. Combat wasn’t what he was built for, which meant it demanded actual focus. He loaded his blaster with blanks and practiced stationary targets for a few hits before moving to moving targets. He stopped when his focus started slipping and moved onto drilling his hand-to-hand forms. Just the way Roller had taught him, years ago. He’d gotten some formal training during the war, but when he was on his own and wanted to practice, his brain always went back to Roller’s street defense lessons.

“You know, brain, I have lots of good memories,” he muttered. “Anytime you wanted to rerun the time me and Roller replaced all of Orion’s furniture with holograms, that’d be great. Or really, anything from University.”

Not that he didn’t have good memories after that. He was just having a hard time thinking of one while he was focusing on keeping his footwork timed correctly. There was stuff, of course. Lots of good stuff. Not just stuff on the Lost Light, earlier than that. There was...

Ratchet sat down, venting hard. He was getting too old for this. Well, he’d been too old for this for a long time, probably. He lay back and stared at the ceiling, the deck of the shuttle humming underneath him in time with the engines. Even the things before the war were tinged with bitterness now, he decided. The war had sunk into things that were and weren’t painful in their own time and poisoned them in retrospect.

He’d have quite happily kept a lid on all of them for the rest of his life. Drift had had the right idea initially—live in the now, not in the past. Probably Ratchet’s persistent needling about Drift’s Decepticon heritage had been a big contributor to his sudden need for introspection, which was what led to his autobiographical datadisk. And then viewing those old pre-war memories were probably what had triggered Ratchet’s current predicament. So it was probably partially his own fault.

Which, given the persistent and intrusive visualization of Auxi’s face twisted in a mindless grin as his spark seized, wasn’t really something he wanted to engage with.

Rung would probably tell him that it was entirely his fault and that he ought to be taking this opportunity to engage with and examine his relationship to his past or some other nonsense. Ratchet had no interest in doing any such thing—Drift and Rung and the rest of them could all come to terms with their inner selves or whatever the frag. He was going to break out the data disks of 9,000 hours of human television Swerve had pushed on him a few weeks ago and not think ever again.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of the short chapters and the lead-up to a bit of plot! 
> 
> The flashback with Bludgeon at the beginning of this chapter is in reference to the events in Spotlight: Orion Pax, if you haven't read that (really all you have to know is that back when the Decepticons were more terrorists than an army, they kidnap Ratchet in order to set up a prisoner exchange).

The ground under him was caked with rust. The walls of the chamber disappeared into shadows high above the stands of feverish crowds. His frame ached and his head had been pounding even before they reached the roar of noise.

The Decepticons who'd hauled him into this chamber grabbed at him, pulling him off the ground and onto his knees. Hands pulled him down as he tried to struggle away. A mech approached with a length of cabling looped around his arm, swinging the hooked tip of the wire in his hand as he approached. Ratchet tugged at the cuffs on his hands desperately and leaned as far back as he could as the mech waggled the hook in front of his optics.

The mech snorted a laugh. He grabbed Ratchet by the helm and jerked his head back. Pain bit into his neck as the mech slid the hook under and through his neck cables. Ratchet could feel energon beginning to run down his neck, dribbling over the wires and cabling in slow pulses. The mech released his helm and gave the lead a tug that had Ratchet gasping for breath.

The mechs over and on him laughed and someone landed a glancing blow to the back of the head, sending him face first into the rust again. Ratchet spat onto the ground and snarled in frustration. Surely these terrorists had better things to than kidnap and torture medics—didn’t they have some power plants to blow up? They could have at least bothered to try to win him over to their side, after going out of their way to snatch him off the fragging street.

Someone dragged him back up again, in time to find himself staring down a mech missing half his face. Bludgeon accepted the lead from his lackey and walked over, looping it around his hand so the wire became shorter and shorter. He was hideous, close up. His face just...ended, no lower jaw or faceplate, his neck cables filling the space hanging so loose that you could have put your hand through them. Disgusting.

Bludgeon leaned over him and dragged him up by the neck, the tension on his delicate neck cables nearly pulling him off his knees as he tried to lesson the pain. Bludgeon didn't have a mouth, so he couldn't be said to _smile_ , but there was no way to read his expression but as a leer.

"Autobot." He reached down with his hand to grip Ratchet by the jaw. "Doctor Ratchet, I presume."

"I'm not joining you. And I'm not telling you anything." There was no point in denying _knowing_ things, Ratchet had been CMO since before Decepticons had existed. He'd been at a private conference with Zeta Prime only a few hours before he’d been snatched. Dismissed his guards and got caught like some hapless skitterer snagged by a cyberlynx.

"Oh, Autobot," Bludgeon loosened his hold on the cable and sank onto his haunches to look Ratchet in the optics, "if we wanted to _seduce_ you we'd have been gentler. And there's really nothing I want you to tell me. You're here for two reasons." He raised one finger up and waggled it. "Bait." He raised a second finger. "And entertainment."

Ratchet smashed his helm into Bludgeon's, sending his world reeling again. Bludgeon snarled in response and there were hands on him, forcing him onto the ground and holding him there. All at once they rolled him over, hands holding him down as Bludgeon yanked him up by the neck. Cables popped and gushed and Ratchet's fingers scrabbled at the rust beneath him. "You'll be more amusing the more _spirited_ you are, but don't push me too far. Your Prime will settle with our terms whether or not you still live. And strategically, it would be sensible to kill the Autobot's best medic. Your life is as long as I remain entertained."

"You’re sick," Ratchet spat.

Bludgeon seemed to be ignoring him. "Now, a medic's hands are terribly sensitive, I'm told. So many nervecircuits accessible to play with. But you're too clever for that, aren't you? You'd just redirect your neural pathways, you'd shut down the signal. I can hurt you, but there's no way to force you to _feel it_."

Bludgeon held out his hand and someone offered him up a laser scalpel. "Or is there? I'm going to offer you a choice, Autobot. Maybe you still feel like rescue's possible. Maybe you're hoping for a daring escape. Either I kill you, now, or you take this scalpel and do whatever I ask you to do."

 _Orion's going to come. Someone's going to come. You've got to play for time._ Ratchet considered making a break for it, attempting another daring escape. His first two escape attempts had landed him a splitting headache and several electrical burns but maybe this time...he shuttered his optics and tried to vent evenly. He wasn't good at pain. The things Orion and the others shrugged off were more than he could imagine.

He was scared. The only thing keeping the lid on that spark-eating fear was the anger. He had to play for time.

Hands shaking, he nodded at the scalpel in Bludgeon's hand. "I'm a little tied up," he said, wiggling his fingers in demonstration.

"Oh, Autobot, I was told you were the best medic on Cybertron. I'm sure that's not going to be a problem for _you_ ," Bludgeon said, tipping his head to the side as that leer lit across his optics again. He pressed the scalpel into Ratchet's hand and folded his fingers around it. "Now, to begin with, I'd like to see you open up your left leg. Right along this seam." He guided Ratchet's bound hands to the seam at his inner thigh, pressed the tip of the scalpel to the dip between plates.

Ratchet hesitated. Around them the crowd and his head roared.

"Entertain me, medic. And don't you dare redirect your sensornet."

The knife slipped into his leg and a scream bubbled out of his mouth as fuel bubbled over his bound hands and he—

 

* * *

 

Woke up. Ratchet lurched forwards, clamping his arms around his leg, the pain still hot from the regurgitated memory. He let his helm fall against his knees and tried to even his ventilations. He wasn't back with Bludgeon. He was on his shuttle, looking for Drift. It was just a memory purge.

Didn't make much difference from his body's perspective, though. Real life and relived memories, it was all the same.

The pain faded after a few minutes, once his sensornet realized there was no cause for the anomalous inputs. He stretched his legs out in the dark and unplugged and put everything away. His spark was still tight in his chest and he gave in to temptation, heading to the secure box in the cabin where he was keeping the few possessions he'd brought on board. He unfurled the thermal blanket he'd gotten from Drift's room and wrapped it securely around his shoulders before sitting himself down in the pilot’s chair. He looked at the stars as they winked by in the darkness.

"You better be out there," he said.

He pulled his knees up onto the chair and under the blanket. He didn't know how to stop thinking, that was the main thing. He just needed to stop dredging all this up and it’d stop coming back. With a sigh, he reached into his hip case and pulled out a memory stick. Maybe, if he couldn't stop thinking about his own memories, he could just substitute them with someone else's. He flipped open his dataport and plugged the datastick in, coded in the password and let the quiet of that first memory rush over him like water as he—

 

* * *

 

Woke up, phantom hands pressing him down and holding him to the ground. He tried to jerk away from them but his body didn't respond, his arms and legs lead weights. The shuddering panic that had invaded his frame rocketed higher as he realized that he couldn't move, even as his optics and slowly calibrating short term memories connected that he was _on the shuttle. Looking for Drift. Nobody here, nobody hurting you._

Frame paralysis. It was his least favorite symptom of disturbed recharge cycles, but nothing to be alarmed about. Just a mistiming of the end of the recharge cycle, such that consciousness returned before the brain sent out the signal to release the body from its partial paralysis that stopped him from actually _acting out_ any of his unfortunate memory purges. A safety measure, nothing to freak out over.

That didn't stop him from freaking out, but it did make him feel more guilty about it. The room loomed dark over him, the shadows of the _totally static, logically definitely not moving objects_ crawling across the floor towards his berth. He shivered, frame rattling against the berth beneath him.

He strained to move his fingers for a paralyzed moment as his ventilations came faster and faster until finally, finally, his hands clenched into fists. Recharge-clumsy, he threw himself off the berth and detached himself from the leads, leaving them on the floor as he headed straight for the brightly lit main corridor of the shuttle. Snarling in frustration, he whacked his hand against his leg a few time until the ache anchored him into the present.

"Frag this," he said, and headed back to the cockpit where he sat on the subspace communicator, listening to the empty fuzz and distant transmissions breaking in and out of signal. He watched the stars and tried to push away the sensation of vagrant phantom hands. His hands, restless, sought out the figurine of Drift he had stashed away. Holding the damned thing shouldn’t have made him feel better, but it did somehow.

It was in the moments like this that he could see the point in religion. Even if Drift was in the situation he was in, he would never be totally alone because he had the ability to _imagine_ that some god existed with him. A thought popped into his head and he queried the console for any local religious sanctuaries. If there was one thing he was sure Drift wouldn’t have abandoned after his exile, it was his faith. He couldn’t have abandoned it then, not when it was the only thing he had left.

He found two of them within hailing distance and sent off a message via subspace. Likely they wouldn’t respond; he wasn’t really sure if that sort of establishment kept actual staff. Propping Drift’s figurine on the dash, he initiated an open download of the available information the first of the sanctuaries had online and—

 

* * *

 

Woke up already in the midst of rolling off the berth and ducking underneath it for cover, the rattle of explosions echoing in his audials. After a long moment of silence he realized his mistake. Old explosions. He was millions of years safe from that particular battle.

"Well, there's a first time for everything," he said to the empty room. _At least I haven't found the idiot yet, or he'd get all worried or some slag like that._ He untangled himself from the lines still connecting him to the energon infuser. He was lucky he hadn't torn the leads out of the case. Of course, fixing it would have given him something to do. He turned on the lights and checked his chrono—still hours left to go in his recharge cycle.

He sat down on the berth and picked up the datapad he'd been reading before he dropped off. No word from First Aid yet, he noted. But maybe First Aid was trying not to bother him and wouldn't message until Ratchet messaged him first. Everyone on that ship was notoriously bad at communicating, he knew that. Still, he'd expected he'd hear _something_ from _someone_. He was still accessible via subspace, or at least he assumed so. Maybe the subspace receiver was damaged, he'd have to check that out and make sure everything was shipshape.

He frowned. It wasn't that he needed to know what was happening on the Lost Light. First Aid was perfectly capable of handling his duties as CMO. But still, he remembered being CMO for the first time—remembered all too vividly right at this moment. He'd wished there was someone, anyone, that he could have turned to for a second opinion, to have his back. He really should have given First Aid the promotion back when he was on board and able to help. Would have, should have, regrets were for people who didn't have enough to do.

Well, that described him perfectly right now, didn't it? He gave up on reading and opened the door to the main corridor and—

 

* * *

 

Woke up. Ratchet lurched forwards, clamping his arms around his leg, the pain still hot from the regurgitated memory. He let his helm fall against his knees and tried to even his ventilations. He wasn't back with Bludgeon. He was on his shuttle, looking for Drift. It was just a memory purge.

Didn't make much difference from his body's perspective, though. Real life and relived memories, it was all the same.

The pain faded after a few minutes, once his sensornet realized there was no cause for the anomalous inputs. He stretched his legs out in the dark and unplugged and put everything away. His spark was still tight in his chest and he gave in to temptation, heading to the secure box in the cabin where he was keeping the few possessions he'd brought on board. He unfurled the thermal blanket he'd gotten from Drift's room and wrapped it securely around his shoulders before sitting himself down in his chair. He looked at the stars as they winked by in the darkness of the cabin.

"You better be out there," he said.

He pulled his knees up onto the chair and under the blanket. He didn't know how to stop thinking, that was the main thing. He just needed to stop dredging all this up and it’d stop coming back. With a sigh, he reached into his hip case and pulled out a memory stick. Maybe, if he couldn't stop thinking about his own memories, he could just substitute them with someone else's. He flipped open his dataport and plugged the datastick in, coded in the password and let the quiet of that first memory rush over him like water as he—

 

* * *

 

Woke up.

He was probably awake now. Probably. That what he remembered immediately before waking was a series of memory purges about waking over the past few weeks rather than some horrible wartime tragedy was a mark in his favor. Of course, even if this was real _now_ , he might relive it again later because his life was a fucking nightmare.

And he didn't even feel less tired.

He got up, unplugged, went through the motions of his routine and found himself out in the hallway a few minutes later, sitting on the floor. _I can't do this anymore. I can't fucking do this anymore._

Recharging was important, but most of its essential functions could be duplicated through other means. Refueling was as easy as pouring out a glass of energon, Drift seemed to refuel without using his infuser at all and he was fine. Calibrating the frame's internal chronometer with the brain’s rhythms was as simple as spending some time in the dark. He was all alone in space, there was plenty of darkness about. Technically, charging and going into standby were important for mental health, to allow any errors that accumulated in the brain to be filed away but it didn't need to be done anywhere near bi-weekly, like he'd been doing. He'd gone without recharging for three months straight once, when he was fresh as a medic. And then a little longer than that, once, when he'd been grabbed by a Decepticon scouting squad. Not a _good_ memory, but it proved his point. Going without recharging for a little bit certainly wasn't going to kill him.

And maybe it'd even reset some of his neural pathways and stop this stupid recharge dysfunction.

Really, it couldn’t get worse.


	4. Chapter 4

Not recharging was, for sure, absolutely going great. Things were a little spinny, but that had been lingering ever since Ratchet touched down on AstoNite and got sloshed in that basement oilhouse, so it might have been engex poisoning. Other than that, he felt great. Clearly he’d just been getting cabin fever and three days bumping shoulders with aliens of all sorts had him _quite_ content sitting back on his shuttle trying to soothe his headache and watching more of Swerve’s fascinating collection of human entertainment. He wasn’t exactly enjoying any of it, but he was finally understanding cultural references Hunter had made years ago, so it wasn’t like he wasn’t getting anything out of it.

No leads though.

There’d been what seemed like a lead, but that had spun out with him facing down an overcharged NAIL who was living as a grounder in a decommissioned shuttle. They were red and white, he’d give Xex credit for that. He wasn’t quite sure how she’d mixed up a heli frame with a speedster, but he probably ought to be grateful that tip had panned out with an _actual Cybertronian_ this time. He was starting to get worried that Drift had jetted through this sector and into the darkness with no one the wiser.

Ratchet had allotted himself sixty minute shifts, in a cycle, to keep himself from going stir-crazy again. It was good to have a routine. So when his HUD popped up his timer warning, he paused his current episode of...whichever show this was. He’d forgotten the title again. Something with space travel, though the details were ludicrously fanciful.

He ran through his systems check of the ship, checking with nav to make sure the autopilot was still running smoothly and there were no proximity alerts to deal with. He’d plotted in a gravity slingshot around one of the local planets to reduce fuel usage when he’d set course across this stretch—that’d be coming up in a few days. He’d been feeling steadier when he’d programed in that he’d make the approach manually. On reconsideration...probably better to have the autopilot handle that. He made the correction.

He checked the subspace communicator again and found a message waiting for him. The frequency was familiar, but it wasn’t until the mech in the recording started talking that he remembered where it was from—the Vis Vitalis.

Thunderclash’s health had taken a turn for the worse. The medic on hand had no explanation for the sudden change, only a request for any who could to plan to visit before time ran out.

He was back at the nav computer, programming in a change of course before the truth hit him. He was too far away and his ship was too slow. Any help he could have offered would arrive far too late.

They’d had time to say their goodbyes, a long time ago. He’d been awful at it, but Thunders had understood. He knew Ratchet, he knew that the words didn’t always work when he needed them to. Thunderclash himself had been impossibly eloquent, of course, and had said a great many things that Ratchet had never forgotten and would forever hold close to his spark.

Ratchet didn't think he could bear to hear last words for a second time. He switched the subspace communicator off. It was illogical and childish and he knew it was, but he couldn’t make himself turn the communication array back on. As if Thunderclash couldn’t die if he didn’t hear about it, some fragging magical thinking he couldn’t seem to knock out of his brain.

And then he fled the shuttle's cockpit.

 

* * *

 

There was a beeping sound coming from the cockpit. Ratchet stared at the wall in confusion for a long moment before remembering that was the sound of the proximity alert. He shook his head, trying to clear it, not quite sure what he’d been doing a moment before. Gravity slingshot. Beeping sound. He'd plotted in a gravity slingshot maneuver, told the autopilot to handle it. Something must have gone wrong.

Ratchet got to his feet and jogged to the cockpit. He swung himself through the doorway and nearly stumbled in shock.

Through the glass he could see the planet looming huge, glittering blue-black oceans and glaring white where the sunlight of the local star reflected off the clouds.

But nearly all of that was blocked out by the orbiting masses of wreckage and the hulking skeleton of what was unmistakably a Decepticon scout ship, right in their flight path.

Ratchet stumbled to the helm and sat down, taking over control from the autopilot and trying to accelerate and force them into a higher orbit that would skim over the wreckage.

They were going too fast. His hands felt clumsy on the controls as he flipped off the safety catches and demanded more acceleration, the console vibrating as the engine strained. They lifted as they accelerated and the console stopped beeping as their charted course finally cleared the wreckage. Ratchet let out a breath and boggled at the wreckage out the viewport.

All around the ship, bits of debris spun in space, blackened and twisted as if by some sort of explosion. Ratchet squinted at the screen, trying to focus on it through what was becoming a pounding headache. There was something else there, something small and...glittery.

The blast threw Ratchet up out of his seat and against the glass as a roar of light filled the ship—


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And more drama! I'm so sorry, Ratchet...

“Hero! Get over here,” Ratchet said, scooping the cyberlynx up off the floor and carrying him over to his desk. “You’re going to miss Thunderclash.” The cat wiggled in his arms until Ratchet sat down. Upon the appearance of _a lap_ to lounge on, Hero sprawled across Ratchet’s knees.

Ratchet snorted. “You’re ridiculous,” he told the cat, scritching him between the nape of his neck and his ruff and drawing out a pleased humming sound. With his free hand he propped up his datapad up against the keyboard and fidgeted, waiting. Thunderclash was busy nowadays, they hadn’t had time to schedule a video call in weeks. Hopefully he wouldn’t be late...Hero nipped at his hand when he stopped petting and Ratchet frowned at him. “Hero, no biting. We talked about this,” he said, inanely, to his cat. Who definitely didn’t understand Neo-Cybex but did appreciate when he moved to using _both_ hands to provide scritches.

The datapad bleeped and Ratchet freed one hand to answer the call. On the other side of the screen, Thunderclash beamed at him. “Ratchet! And Hero, it’s good to see the both of you.”

“Thunderclash,” Ratchet said. “How’ve you been?”

“Busy,” Thunderclash said. “I’m excited by all these new responsibilities, but there’s a lot of work in running a diplomatic mission and I frankly don’t think the senate’s sent me with near enough people to actually run this embassy properly. But most of what I’m doing is the sort of classified you can’t put on a clearspace message. How’s your residency been going? I heard you were assigned to the hospital in Rodion, that’s great—a very prestigious assignment.”

Ratchet looked off to the window in his apartment that looked out over the alley, where he could see the rising fumes coming off the oilhouse next door, twining in the breeze. “Things are okay,” he lied. “It’s a lot of work, which I knew it was going to be. But still, it gets to you even if you were expecting it,” he said. “Hero’s been missing me, I think. He misses you too.”

“I’m sure things will even out once you’ve got your permanent assignment,” Thunderclash said. “And I miss you guys too. I wish I could be there, somebody ought to be making sure you’re feeding yourself and recharging enough and that you get some sunlight once in awhile. Your friend Orion better be on the case.”

“I don’t need a sparkmaid, Thunders,” Ratchet grumbled. “And Orion’s been around. We see each other.”

“I just worry, you know. I’m a worrier. So what specialty have they placed you in?” Thunderclash asked.

Ratchet squirmed. “I’m still floating between surgical departments, they haven’t decided if they want me in trauma surgery or internal systems. Hopefully that’ll settle down soon.”

“Hopefully, I imagine that must be stressful for your faculty mentor,” Thunderclash said. “Did you already...no, I’m sure you didn’t. Who’d you get as your faculty mentor? Not Suresight, I hope.”

“Thunders, can we not talk about this?” Ratchet said, wrapping his arms around Hero. “I only have a few hours home today, I don’t really want to spend the whole time talking about work.”

Thunderclash visibly floundered for a moment, then recovered with a small and probably pitying smile. “I’m sorry Ratchet, didn’t mean to stress you out. Well, I suppose we could talk about the book I picked up the other day. Doublepass recommended it to me but I really think you’d enjoy it...”

The conversation lasted another ten minutes, sticking purely to the least important and most inconsequential topics. Eventually they ran out of things to say and Ratchet picked up the datapad so Thunderclash could watch Hero zoom around the apartment for a few minutes. He said goodbye feeling lighter than he had in days and then collapsed onto the berth as everything awful washed back over him.

Residency was _awful._ Panax was still convinced Ratchet had cheated his way into his position and was doing everything possible to trip him up, including assigning Ratchet to shifts in every single department. He’d had to learn the department structure and workflow for thirteen departments and he was behind every other resident because he just _couldn’t keep up_. The other students had picked up on the hostility the hospital faculty directed at him and started avoiding him. He could spend a twenty hour shift without a single other bot in his cohort acknowledging to him and he was going to scream or break down at work. It was just all so petty and pathetic and he couldn’t even bear to tell Thunderclash what was happening.

With a chirrup, Hero hopped up onto his chest and nosed at his chin insistently. “Hey, it’s okay,” Ratchet said, throwing his arms around him. “I’m okay. I’m going to be okay.”

Hero settled down and let Ratchet pet him for a bit, rumbling against his chest. “Residency’s the worst bit, right? It’s all going to get better from here.”

 

* * *

 

There was a sliver of Optimus in his hand, a jagged piece of him held between Ratchet’s thumb and forefinger. There were a thousand pieces of Optimus laid across the operating table. Everyone was waiting for Ratchet to pull off a miracle and he just didn’t have the spark to tell them that he didn’t believe in miracles.

He lifted the piece into the light and leaned close with his magnifier to try and get some clue about where this piece went. A bit of circular scoring on one side, the lustre of the metal, he was pretty sure this was one of the missing pieces of Optimus’s spinal conduit. He set it in the bowl with the others and rose to see to his patient.

He’d had to improvise a CR chamber that he could do active surgery in, because he didn’t trust Optimus’s spark not to fail if he lifted it away from its life support. What he’d ended up with was a open-topped glass aquarium set on top of one of the workstations. It was small, but the remaining bits of him fit easily inside—brain, spark, lifecord and the Matrix, still somehow held tight to Optimus’s spark. It had to be the Matrix that was keeping him alive. Ratchet knew he wasn't doing enough, but the thousand monitoring wires crowding the glowing liquid told him that _somehow_ Optimus was still alive.

He set his bowl full of spinal conduit shards down on the table and picked up his suturing equipment. He dipped his hand into the viscous liquid and cradled Optimus’s lifecord, examining the ragged edges of the spinal conduit.

Everyone needed to believe that he was some extra-competent medic, that the CMO could fix anything and pull off miracles. It wasn’t true—there were plenty of mechs as good as he was. But telling them that he was powerless to stop the Prime from dying would be bad for morale. He wasn’t here to run his mouth, he was here to fix people. One piece at a time, like he’d always done.

 

* * *

 

Optimus’s half-assembled face grinned at him from under the surface of the liquid, an optical illusion he couldn’t unsee now that he’d spotted it. _It’s not a death grin, he’s not dead, you’re better than this._ He felt like he was spiraling apart in this tiny medibay, surrounded by bits and pieces of the Prime and his slowly reforming frame. Optimus’s dark optics seemed to follow him wherever he went throughout the room, accusing him, blaming him, asking him how in Primus’s name it had taken him most of a month to assemble the beginnings of his core systems.

Ratchet sifted through the pieces on his operating table and found a fragment that probably would match up with the empty space above his optical ridge. One piece at a time. Outside that door their army was falling apart without a leader to pull them through this. They needed Optimus, they needed him whole. One piece at a time.

 

* * *

 

Ratchet jerked awake as the ship’s lights rebooted. There was a horrible wrongness about his midsection and he knew even before he looked what he was going to see.

He gritted his teeth and made himself look anyway.

He was still thrown against the viewport, but in the explosion, the shuttle must have been thrown against the wreckage of that Decepticon ship. Thrown _through_ the wreckage, because there was several feet of splintered support strut sticking out of his chest, pinning him to the glass. It wasn’t through his spark or his fuel pump, but there was no _good_ place to get impaled. He was going to be leaking like the pit the moment he managed to get himself free.

Also, it hurt like blazes, but that was just part and parcel of getting impaled.

The bigger issue was figuring out what was happening to his shuttle. What had that blast been? What had knocked them into the Decepticon wreckage? And why the frag had Ratchet just fallen into powersave mode _again_ when he’d absolutely disabled his recharge initiation protocols?

And, possibly more importantly, was whatever or _whoever_ had done it still out there?

All excellent academic questions that were going to have to shove off for a bit, because Ratchet couldn’t answer any of them while leaking out with a pole through his chest. To get free he had to pull himself up the column, his feet sliding against the glass as he tried to hold his weight and stop from sliding back down. His fingertips dug into the serrated edges of the pole and he could feel bits of it snapping off and jabbing into his internals.

He threw himself off, hit the console and rolled down onto the floor, face first. He let himself lay there for a moment, limbless with pain. He gave himself a count of five, then locked eyes on the emergency medstation. He crawled towards it, too slow, obviously too slow because he was losing fuel fast and the more he lost the harder it was going to be to fix himself. He kept one hand clenched over the exit wound as he folded down and then hauled himself onto the berth. He gave himself another five seconds to go limp before he folded out the viewscreen and got a good look at the damage.

Not good, but his mind was already flying, planning which lines to clamp first and which systems to shut down as he dug around for an emergency fuel booster with soaked hands. He needed to buy time.

The booster hit his systems in a rush and he could feel the gush of fuel leaking back out in response to the increase of fluid pressure.

A light flashed off the viewscreen overhead and then he was swept back under.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear things get better...eventually...
> 
> Sorry this chapter was a bit late - I forgot there was a whole scene that needed reworking and left it off till the evening. In any case, hope you're enjoying this very sad story of misery, pain, and all of a sudden, an actual plotline! Surprise, this story about dreams is also a space survival flick 
> 
> Warning for death-seeking behaviour (not quite suicide ideation but probably similar enough for some folks to steer clear) for one of the flashbacks here. You can skip over it by skipping the scene that starts "Look, I don't want to tell you..."

There was someone waiting on the walkway outside Ratchet’s apartment. He paused on the steps for a moment, staring at the mech in silhouette: first in confusion and then dawning horror. _Ratchet, you fragging dumbaft. You forgot date night._ He took the stairs two at a time, trying and discarding a new excuse with every step. No excuses. He’d just own up to forgetting and—

“Ratchet! You’re late,” Anodyne said, holding a struggling mass of cyberlynx in his arms. Hero was doing his best imitation of a whirlwind, trying to get free from Anodyne. “And you weren’t picking up your phone. Hero got out somehow, I found him on the street!” Anodyne’s face was crumpled in disappointment.

Ratchet slumped. “I’m sorry, Anodyne. Work was a mess, Panax kept me late, I completely forgot our plans were for tonight. Let me hold him, he’s going to scratch your paint.” He held out his arms and Hero bounded over, crawling up onto Ratchet’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

Anodyne gave him a pained smile. “I’m sure you’ll do your best. Do you want to clean up before we go out? You’ve got a definite medical aroma about you.”

“Yeah, of course, of course,” Ratchet patted himself down, looking for his keycard. He hadn’t _forgotten_ that too, had he? He turned it up after a minute of flustered searching. “Do you want to wait inside? I could pour you a drink or something.”

Anodyne waved him off. “No, I’m good. Go get ready, I’ll answer some of my mail and enjoy the nice weather.”

Ratchet got the door and stepped through to his apartment, closing the door on his partner. Hero bounded off his shoulder and onto the counter as Ratchet hurried over to the washrack. Ratchet glanced over his shoulder to check that Hero’s bowl wasn’t empty. Somehow there were several bowls left on the counter, but at least one of them still had energon in it.

He kicked a few piles of datapads and empty boxes out of the way of the washrack door. He kept them around for Hero, but if he’d realized it was date night he’d definitely have found the time to tidy up a bit. Ratchet scrubbed his hand over his face and noticed he was still holding his keycard. He hissed through his teeth and walked back to slap the keycard onto the counter. Hero shoved his face at Ratchet’s hand, demanding a good scritch.

Ratchet indulged him for a moment, bouncing on his heels with impatience but unwilling to let Hero think he was mad at _him._ “Hey buddy, hope the hunting was good today,” Ratchet murmured. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I gotta go get ready. We can hang out when I get back.”

He locked himself in the washracks and stepped into the UV sanitizer. He liked to scrub down properly after a workshift, but he didn’t want Anodyne to be waiting even longer than he had to. The UV’d kill the surgical smell and that’d be good enough.

“Fragging stupid,” Ratchet muttered, banging the heel of his hand against his leg. Forgetting date night. He was going to ruin the second best thing in his life if he couldn’t get it together. The urge to claw at his plating or break something was bubbling tense under the surface, but he only indulged in a little too-loud slamming of the washrack door on his way out. Hero stared at him reproachfully and Ratchet shrugged in apology.

He hurried to the door and reached for it, only to remember that he’d left his keycard back on the counter. He looped back for it, taking the opportunity to dump Hero’s empty bowls in the bucket he kept for the washing-up. He flicked the lights back off and swept the door open.

“Hey, sweetspark, did you miss me?” He said, before his brain caught up with his mouth and he remembered that _emphasizing_ his lateness probably wasn’t going to go over well.

But Anodyne was standing there in front of him, arms loosely draped over the railing, smiling. In the blue streetlights his red plating looked a lustrous sort of purple, the light refracting through his rotors and dancing over his face. “Yeah,” Anodyne said, real soft and sweet. “I did miss you, Ratchet.” He stepped forward to wrap Ratchet in a gangly-limbed hug.

Ratchet froze for a moment, then relaxed into it, draping his arms around Anodyne’s waist. “Sorry I’m like this,” he muttered into Anodyne’s neck.

“It’s okay. You’re just stressed out. I should have messaged you yesterday to remind you we had plans.”

“That shouldn’t be your job,” Ratchet said. “I’ll put it in my calendar next time.”

“Of course,” Anodyne said. “And I’ll send you a reminder just in case.” He leaned down to plant a kiss on Ratchet’s helm, then pulled away. He offered Ratchet a hand. “Ready to go?”

“Where are we going again?” Ratchet asked, slipping his hand in Anodyne’s.

“Same bar as ever,” Anodyne said. Giving his hand a squeeze, he led them down the steps.

“However did I find the perfect bot?” Ratchet said with a smile.

“If I recall correctly, you got stuck in an elevator with them,” Anodyne said, grinning over his shoulder at Ratchet. “And I have _never_ gotten you to spend that much time with me ever since.”

“Soon!” Ratchet promised. “Only one more year and then I’ll be out from under Panax. Things will calm down.”

“I’m holding you to that, doc.”

 

* * *

 

Another body on the slab in front of him. Big frame, genericon, blast damage to the upper torso and severed left leg below the knee. Ratchet gave the guard who’d lugged the bot down to the cells an unimpressed sneer. “You’d save a lot of time and effort if you brought _me_ to the medibay instead of the medibay to _me_ , you know,” he said.

The Decepticon overseer lurched towards him, shock stick held high. “Prisoner, you will speak when spoken to.”

“Yeah. I know,” Ratchet said, optics flicking towards the other side of the cell where his people laid limbless on the floor, forced into standby mode. All still whole, none of them ripped apart or tortured or killed yet. They’d been true to their word on that, at least. Ratchet was pretty sure this little Decepticon outpost probably didn’t _have_ a medibay anymore. They’d been quick to offer up the deal—his compliance in return for his comrades’ safety.

Ratchet went to work. “Any chance you guys have any neurex saturate lying around? I’d like to give the patient a boost to keep his spark levels stable before I begin operating,” he said conversationally. No answer, which probably meant _no_. When Ratchet got out of here he was going to have one heck of an inside survey of Decepticon supply chains.

None of the good drugs, but what they did have was plenty of bodies. Ratchet sized up his patient and limped over to the other side of the cell where they were keeping the empties. “If I had access to my internal toolset I could do a lot better job,” Ratchet said pointedly, wiggling his wrists to flash the inhibitor cuffs at the guard. The guard didn’t rise to the bait, more's the pity. Ten of Ratchet’s better escape plans relied on him getting the inhibitor cuffs off. Instead the guard just dully offered him the one laser scalpel and waited for Ratchet to scavenge the requisite parts. Ratchet dragged himself back to the table and repaired the enemy soldier as best he could. The guard took them away.

Ratchet leaned against the table and waited for the guard to return with the next patient. If only they’d let Wheeljack stay awake too—between the two of them Ratchet was sure they’d have escaped days ago. And if rescue was coming...well, it’d probably have been there days ago as well. Ratchet had no particular interest in playing good doctor for a bunch of moody genericons with shock sticks for the next decade, so he was just going to have to manage an escape.

The next patient was dying. Someone had got him good, a cut from hip to shoulder splitting him wide open. Ratchet opened his mouth to tell the guard that there was nothing he could do for that mech; he was minutes from fading even with his full setup...when a thought occurred to him. A very, very nasty thought.

Elbows deep in a dying Decepticon soldier, he tried to summon up everything he’d ever overheard about weapons engineering. Building the gun wasn’t going to be the hard part—the hard part was going to be keeping the soldier alive long enough to finish _while_ assembling his internals into a working weapon.

“Sorry soldier,” Ratchet said, “just rest easy. The worst part’ll be over soon.”

The soldier stared at him in vague pain-clouded terror. Ratchet looked away.

 

* * *

 

They’d built the bots to look identical, hung in their thawing rigs in the drop shuttle. Ratchet walked the ranks, checking rechecking hookups. They wouldn’t be fully thawed until the ship was airborne, at which point there’d be twenty minutes for them to come to terms with the inevitability of their coming deaths before they were dropped out over Corcapsia. There was a point where he’d have been at someone’s throat for this. There was a time when the horror had felt fresh and their mistakes fixable.

He signed off on the ship.

 

* * *

 

“Look, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job,” Ratchet said, spitting energon onto the cell floor, “but when they told you to ‘guard the prisoner’, starting the torture early was definitely _not_ implied.”

The blue and purple jet apparently didn’t take criticism well. With a shriek of fury, he cracked his energy whip against the floor, catching Ratchet across the shin mostly by accident. Ratchet cringed back against the chair he’d been locked into.

Whatever virus the guard had jacked into his brain module had completely disabled his ability to redirect his sensornet, leaving him a live wire stretched out and exposed. They’d even included a special set of clamps to hold his hands flat against the armrests, palms up. Ratchet could pretty much guess where they were going from there.

“Shut up,” the guard hissed. “ _You_ don’t get to talk. Not after what you did.”

Ratchet blinked his optics slowly at the guard and shrugged against his bonds. “I’m three million years old, you’re going to have to be a trifle more specific than that, kid.”

There was a moment where Ratchet wasn’t sure how the guard was going to respond—monologuing or immediate retaliation. He couldn’t really summon up the momentum to care. He could see his last moments looming up fast ahead of him, writhing under whatever tortures Megatron and his lackeys needed to drag the Prime’s location out of him. Any pain or boredom this guard filled the interim with didn’t really matter.

When, after a moment’s hesitation, the guard dropped the whip and drew a knife from his thigh holster, Ratchet realized dully he’d forgotten his options weren’t mutually exclusive.

“Honestly, the whip was more intimidating,” Ratchet said. He could probably have talked the mech down if he’d cared. He could remember earlier torturers he’d tried to desperately bargain with, who he’d tried to outwit, who he’d killed his pride to endure. But those were things you did to buy time for a rescue or an escape. Ratchet knew neither of those were possible.

There wasn’t anyone left to do the rescuing. They were all holed up with Optimus’s body or scattered to the four corners of the galaxy or presumed dead.

And there wasn’t time for a daring escape, even if he could have summoned the energy to fight his failing body to do it. Megatron had promised to return to personally oversee the interrogation in a few minutes.

Death was inevitable. Pain was inevitable. But seeing the rising fury in the guard’s frame, Ratchet felt a faint glimmer of hope. Megatron didn’t have mnemosurgeons at his command who could drag the Prime’s location out of his dead brain. If he could tip this guard over the edge, he could keep the Prime’s secret safe. One last duty to see him through.

“Shut up,” the guard said, slipping the blade of the knife under the plating of his palm and prying it up and out. He repeated the effect on the other side. “This was my friend’s blade. His name was Breakblade.”

“I am...doing,” Ratchet wheezed through the pain, “my absolute best...not to laugh at your friend’s name.”

“Shut up!” The guard drove the knife into the exposed internals of Ratchet’s palm, pinning him to the chair below. Everything shorted white for a moment and then Ratchet heaved back into his body where everything was screaming alarms. He tried to activate his vocoder and got static, the sensornet so hot it couldn’t carry the signal. The guard tore his knife free and pried it under a different piece of plating on Ratchet’s arm. “He fell in battle and then you cut him open and mutilated his body to salvage parts to fix your soldiers. Soldiers who killed the rest of my company. Is nothing sacred in this war? You deserve to have everything done to you that you did to him.”

He’d probably done it, used this kid’s friend for parts during some battlefield surgery that he couldn’t pick out of the haze of neverending battlefield surgeries. Dismember the dead and build them into soldiers. Sparks fresh or frozen into patchwork bodies, whatever it took. The days of frame donor lists long gone, abandoned in their desperation. He was almost jealous of the guard’s moral clarity, that desperate fury.

But all he could focus on was the rising certainty that the guard was finding momentum in his anger. Maybe he wouldn’t need much more pushing.

“No,” Ratchet growled. “There is no sacred. No Primus to judge us. If you want me judged, you’re going to have to do it yourself.”

He spat fuel at the mech and grinned in victory as the guard ripped a handful of sensornet out of Ratchet’s exposed arm with his hands.

Energon splattered on the floor and the kid was saying something Ratchet couldn’t understand. His brain kept trying to skitter off somewhere safe only to be dragged back by that damned virus the guard had installed. There was a roaring sound in his audials. His vision was blurring red with overlapping error messages. The kid picked up what looked like a crowbar and jammed it in the seam beside Ratchet’s chestplate.

The kid reached his hands into Ratchet’s chest and started tearing pieces free and Ratchet couldn’t seem to raise himself to feel anything. The roaring in his audials grew louder as his optics dimmed and Optimus would understand that sometimes giving up was the only way—

 

* * *

 

Ratchet woke up leaking and unwilling to give up without a fight ever again. That decision had nearly lost them the war that day; if Starscream hadn’t chosen that day to turn on Megatron...the lights flickered back on again as he shook off that phantom helplessness. Real crisis, right now, he needed to _focus_.

The view through his HUD was spotty, the booster having clearly flooded back out of his systems in the time he was unconscious. He could hear it dripping onto the floor, spreading out in a sticky puddle beneath him.

He’d lost some of his sensornet control when he was knocked unconscious, limbs fuzzy and humming with errant signals. He fumbled for a second fuel booster and, after a moment of frustrated scraping at the port, got it plugged in. He unspooled the diagnostic cable from the overhead medical monitor and loaded up his full readouts.

His mind went a bit hazy with panic when he saw the readouts. The wreckage had torn not just through fuel lines but a big chunk of the cooling system. He didn’t have the supplies for this widespread of parts replacement and the tears in his sensornet were going to frag up his motor control and he just didn’t have _time_. Fixing this right would take multiple hours and specialized parts synthesis and he didn’t have the time.

It was a hack job. He drew up an injector of neurex saturate to keep him boosted through the operation and rode through on pure stubbornness. He clamped all the fuel lines down, minus one bypass line so didn’t line so the fuel didn’t get jammed up in his arm, working off a camera aimed at his chest cavity wired to the monitor above.

He’d always admired Pharma’s blase attitude towards self-surgery, the way the mech barely seemed to differentiate between operating on a patient and putting the scalpel to himself. Ratchet always found the perspective threw him off, everything upside down and backwards even in the best of times. This wasn’t the best of times.

But he slowed the worst of the leaks to a slow ooze and then isolated the area with a emergency expansive foam to keep anything from jostling around before he could finish. He rolled to his side and awkwardly clamped a wraparound patch over the wound to keep everything airtight. Then he pushed himself to sitting, out of the puddle of his own fuel he’d been lying in. It was everywhere, like some gorish horror film. His optics followed the trail of pink away from the berth and over to the intruding piece of wreckage. Energon dripped off the twisted metal and onto the console. He shuddered, hands gripping tight on his knees and tried to put his situation in perspective.

His makeshift repairs would hold for a bit. He wouldn’t be able to use that arm much and if he didn’t keep calm he was going to roast his brain with the coolant system offline. But he had...four fuel boosters left. If he kept his fuel pressure up and didn’t overheat, his injury wouldn’t have time to kill him.

He was stuck in orbit. He’d crashed into a Decepticon wreck. The engine was down, but the electrical systems had rebooted. He wasn’t dead yet. Some sort of outside attacker was attacking the ship with an energy weapon and knocking him offline. Whatever they were doing, it didn’t seem to be fatal. At least not yet.

He was alone in space and no one knew where he was or where he was going. There was at least a day’s travel between him and the nearest inhabited planet. He didn’t know what was out there or how long he had before they either fried his brain module or boarded the ship. There was no one he could ask for help.

Some alien impulse told him to send out a distress call. Ratchet fought it. There was _no one_. He was still leaking, the ship was disabled and he was under attack. The only point of a distress call would be to tell folks where to find his body—

That gave Ratchet pause. There’d been a lot of moments during the war that he’d thought might have been his time. But all those times he would have been Ratchet, Autobot CMO, surrounded by friends or enemies. The thought of being some nameless body floating in space around some unexplored planet...Ratchet had never liked the idea of space burials. Floating. Alone. A body ought to stay where you put it, so folks could come find it.

He dragged himself over to the subspace communicator and slumped into the seat. He’d leave a message, just in case, before he went out there. He fired the system up, wiping fuel off the screen with his hand. _Just needed a little time..._

The readout filled with a rapid scroll of received messages and then began blinking. _PRIORITY ONE MESSAGE : LOCAL SPACE_ There was an active broadcast coming from somewhere in orbit around the planet, queued up on every available frequency. Ratchet pressed the button and some horrible klaxon noise filled the ship. _Attention. Attention. This planet is the sovereign homeland of the Kleryes people, who are under protection by contract with the Black Box Consortium. There is an active anti-Cybertronian defense system in orbit around the planet, in accordance with the No Safe Passage protocol. If you are trapped within the field, do not move your vessel. The neural blasts are harmless to organic species and propulsion will trigger the kinetic mines. A rescue team will arrive to navigate you out of the minefield. Attention. Attention. This planet is the sovereign homeworld of—_

Ratchet startled out of his chair and slapped at the comm system until the warning message cut off. _No Safe Passage._ Whatever fantasy he’d been cooking up on the backburner of his brain, he hadn’t imagined a deathtrap like a NSP system.

No Safe Passage was _ancient_ —it predated the Galactic Empire. Organic planets had licensed with the Black Box Consortium to design and implement orbiting anti-Cybertronian minefields, designed through some arcane science to knock the Cybertronian nervous system permanently offline. It had been designed to be harmless to organics...turned out, not so much. The people on the planet below must have all died off millions of years ago from the NSP system poisoning the atmosphere. Ratchet had never even seen a NSP system up close.

And he probably still wouldn’t be. The neural pulses it was emitting should have knocked him dead from the start. There was no way to know if he’d survive another one.

Ratchet moved himself back into his seat and stared at the screen. If he only had minutes left, what did he want to spend them doing? He might have time to record a goodbye message, something so they’d know where to look for the body.

He wanted Drift. It wasn’t rational but nothing had made sense ever since the war ended. Since the war began. He wanted there to be somebody to rescue him. He wanted it to be Drift.

He queued up a short range broadcast and typed up his details—ship stranded, engine possibly disabled. One crewmember, mechanical. Caught in a NSP minefield, orbital specs. Emergency, all due haste requested in assistance rendered. He sent the message off and used the intruding piece of wreckage to pull himself to his feet. It was still sticky with fuel and Ratchet wiped his hand off on his already sticky leg before limping back over to the medstation to stow the remaining fuel boosters and neurex saturate in his hip case. He folded the berth back out of the way and then hung there, gasping for breath.

A light from out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. Through the crackled viewscreen, he could see tiny pinpricks of light blinking on in waves, like charge cascading through a neural net.

_Frag, who’d have thought a minefield could be beautiful?_

He was too captivated by the view to think to get closer to the ground before the blast knocked him offline.


	7. Chapter 7

“Ratchet, with me,” Panax said with a wave of his hand. Ratchet startled and stepped away from the berth. He looked skeptically from his patient to the hospital administrator. Panax waved his hand again and one of Ratchet’s cohort stepped into the doorway. “Heppen will finish your rounds, come along.”

Ratchet walked over reluctantly, giving the patient an apologetic grimace and handing his chart over to Heppen before he followed Panax out into the hall. “What is it, sir?” Ratchet asked.

“I’ve been asked to bring you to a meeting about a possible transfer,” Panax said grimly. “Don’t look at me, _I_ didn’t recommend you. They’ve gone behind my back on this.” The mech waved his access card over the keypad of the elevator and the doors swept open for them. Panax stepped inside and crossed his arms, glaring a hole in the wall in front of him. Ratchet sidled into the corner and tried to look unobtrusive.

 _A transfer?_ Ratchet hadn’t even dared to hope for a transfer out from under Panax before his residency finished. The mech _had_ to have realized by now that Ratchet was as competent as any of his other residents, but things had never gotten better. Too fragging stubborn to back down. Ratchet had planned on outlasting him until he was permitted to choose his primary hospital assignment. A transfer...it was everything he could have asked for, but what was he going to tell Anodyne? Anodyne was permanently assigned to Rodion, he wasn’t going to be happy with the idea of Ratchet moving away.

When the elevator reached the bottom, Panax led them wordlessly out onto the street and to one of the rail lines. They stood in silence, Panax tapping his foot impatiently until their railcar arrived. Ratchet had no clue where they were going, and he knew better than to ask. Maybe this was because of one of those experimental cases he’d been given the week before? He’d been aware that there were a few visitors monitoring the surgery from the observation window, but he hadn’t gotten a good look at any of them.

From the railcar, they exited out on a nondescript street. A wealthy one, from the look of it. The buildings were tall and looked like they’d been freshly polished, the streets were bare of litter and loiterers. Panax led him to a building with blue-green cladding and pressed his hand to the reader beside the door. The door slid open to reveal a wide-shouldered mech. “Administrator Panax?” the doorguard asked.

Panax nodded. “As requested.”

“And then this is Medic Ratchet,” the guard said, nodding over Panax’s shoulder. “Excellent. Please stand still, I have to run a spark scan to ensure your identities before admitting you to the building.”

 _Weird._ That was the sort of security they ran at the entrance to the Grand Imperium, not to anonymous apartment buildings on the outer fringes of Rodion. Ratchet and Panax stood awkwardly as the mech ran a scanner over their chestplates. He squinted at the readout and then waved them inside. “All in order,” he said.

“Is he upstairs?” Panax asked.

“Yes,” the mech said. “But I’m to ask you to wait here in the entryway until he’s finished speaking with Medic Ratchet.”

Panax snorted. With a brushing-off wave of his hand, he wandered over to the set of deep green chairs by the wall, hanging beneath an opulent chandelier of luminescent blue glass panels. Ratchet looked around. If the exterior of the building had seemed a bit expensive, the inside was absolutely ludicrous. No wall, no chair, no wall panel went without unnecessary glitz or ostentatious patterning. _Who the frag had called this meeting?_ There was no way it was a fellow hospital administrator. Maybe a senator?

But Ratchet knew better than to ask questions. He let the guard lead him to the elevators (polished to a mirror shine) and then up to the top floor. The guard stepped out smartly and announced, “Medic Ratchet, my Prime.”

Ratchet froze on the threshold of the elevator. The room was a swirl of imported fabrics, plush velvet draperies and metallo-embroidered tapestries that hung from ceiling to floor. Beyond them, a deep voice answered the guard, “Send him in.”

“Of course, sir,” the guard said. He looked over his shoulder at Ratchet and, with a roll of his optics, grabbed Ratchet by the arm and pushed him through the crush of fabric.

In the dim light beyond, the Prime stood holding a cube of energon in each hand. He held one out to Ratchet with a genial smile. “Drink?”

“Um, thank you, sir,” Ratchet said, accepting the cube with both hands and what was nearly a curtsy. He had no fragging idea what you were supposed to do in the presence of the Prime. The possibility had never really crossed his mind as an actual _possibility_.

The liquid within the cup was a swirl of purple floating on top of a hazy blue, probably engex. Ratchet had never gone in for the fancy slag, and he wasn’t stupid enough to drink on-shift. But he was pretty sure turning down a drink from the Prime was probably against protocol, so he took a sip and smiled through the searing burn. “Panax said you wanted to speak with me,” he said, rather obviously.

“Yes,” Nominus said, gesturing with his rather overfull glass. “I do.” He wandered to the edge of his cave of tapestries and pushed the edge of one aside, allowing sunlight to wash over his face. “Do you know anyone in the Senate, Ratchet? Are you friends with any Senators?”

“Um, no sir. My medical placement keeps me busy and I’m not interested in politics.”

“My medics are,” Nominus said, letting the curtain fall closed. “All of them. And the administrators of the regional hospitals, Panax and the rest, the Senate’s gotten to them too. I don’t like it. I don’t like the idea of _my_ medic being beholden to outside influences. But you—you’re young. You’re not interested in politics. And I’ve seen your test scores, I’ve watched you in surgery—you’re quite the exceptional mech.”

“I do my job,” Ratchet said solidly, taking another sip of the engex. He’d kept his FIM chip enabled, but he could feel the world going out of phase as Nominus spoke. He could get a sense of where things were going and it wasn’t anything he felt capable of comprehending.

“Well, from now on, I’d like you to do a different job,” Nominus Prime commanded. “I’m appointing you to the position of Chief Medical Officer.”

 

* * *

 

Ratchet set the phone down on the table with a clatter. Ratchet turned back to his console and ran the lookup again. Surety of Kaon, the only specialist in progressive form fatigue amongst the Autobots. His subspace frequency was listed on the screen and Ratchet tapped it in a second time. The phone spat back static, frequency not recognized.

With shuddering hands, he queued up a call with one of the archivists stationed at Kimia. “CMO speaking,” he said roughly. “I was looking for a status update on a mech posted at Kimia Station. Surety of Kaon, he should be one of the medics stationed there. I can’t seem to raise him on subspace.”

The voice on the other side of the line was quiet for a moment and then, the inevitable. “I’m sorry. Surety was killed in a Decepticon raid. His status must not have been properly updated. I’ll attend to that.”

“I understand. Ratchet out,” Ratchet said. He hung up and buried his face in his hands. The feeling of his insensate hands pressing against his face tipped him over the edge.

 

* * *

 

“Cybercrosis?” The mech on the berth stared at Ratchet with wide, disbelieving optics. “But I...I just got here.”

Ratchet resisted the urge to pat the mech on the shoulder and busied his hands with his datapad. “I know, and I’m sorry. The radiation you were exposed to on the battlefield seems to have triggered exceptionally early-onset Cybercrosis. I know it can’t be easy to hear this, but the good news is we’ve caught this in the early stages. You’ve still got time.”

“Years?” The mech asked. The MTO pulled his legs up onto the berth and hugged his knees anxiously. Ratchet didn’t know what to say. The mech was barely three years old—above average MTO life expectancy, but still. Ratchet had barely started university at his age. He couldn’t have fathomed death.

“Weeks,” Ratchet said, reaching out to take the mech’s hand. “Maybe months, if we’re very lucky. I’m going to do everything I can to make it months.”

The mech squeezed Ratchet’s hand and broke Ratchet’s spark. “But they told me you could fix anything.”

 

* * *

 

Ratchet woke up, still alive, and peeled himself off the floor. His mind was a blur of overlapping emotional afterimages. He rubbed at his helm, trying to push them away and bring back that sense of panic and, more importantly, momentum he’d been feeling before he got cut off. He wasn’t dead yet, for whatever reason—maybe their system had degraded over time and just didn’t have enough power to knock him permanently offline.

Ratchet stumbled back to the console and checked for incoming calls. Nothing. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been out, or how long he had until the next blast, but he knew that nobody was going to respond before it was too late.

Everything would be fine if he could just get the ship out of range of the minefield. _One step at a time, Ratchet. You can fix this._ To do that he was going to need to get the engine back online. To do that he was going to need to get to the engine and figure out why it was offline.

The hallway was narrow enough to drag himself through leaning against one wall and bracing his arm against the opposite. Ratchet took it slow, keeping an internal diagnostic up on his HUD. Fuel levels and temperature were within acceptable parameters, but it wouldn’t take much more stress to send them spiraling.

At the end of the hallway he fumbled with the door controls before giving up on getting his right arm to cooperate and dragging it open with his left. The sensornet damage was worse than he’d thought—his right hand was spasmodic and jerky and didn’t seem to be responding with a tenth of the force he felt like he was exerting.

Beyond the door, cargo was strewn about from the force of the impact. Ratchet stepped across to the access hatch down to the engineering area. The ladder seemed too much work, so he let himself drop heavily into the dim space below.

The main engine was blinking red and silent. There was only the humming of the grav engines and the gentle pulsing noise of the backup electrical generator filling the normally deafening space. It was eerie.

Ratchet reached for the engine and pulled himself to face the access panel. Ratchet had never been much of an engineer. Which, yes, was ironic. Every jokester in the engineering department had pointed out to him that he’d fixed bots that turned _into_ space shuttles, how much harder could it be to understand normal space shuttles?

It wasn’t that it was _hard_ , it was that there was a limited amount of information any one person could remember and Ratchet was busy remembering medical slag. He didn’t have space in his brain for that and aerospace engineering.

But several million years of experience had taught him to be prepared for disaster. From under the console, he fetched out the datapad he’d saved off the shuttle’s technical operations onto and sank down to the ground. He sped ahead to the section on engines. Ratchet leaned up against the port engine crawlspace, digging out another fuel booster as he skimmed.

Once he got to the bit with the diagrams, he popped the casing off the engine’s access panel and wiggled his way into the narrow space beneath it. He braced the datapad against his buggered hand and craned his neck to see where the damage was.

There was a puddle pooling out on the floor beyond his head. Ratchet brushed his good hand through the puddle and then to the wall beyond—also wet. It was draining down the wall from somewhere above him. He squinted at the fluid in the dim light, then touched his wet fingers to the tip of his glossa.

Coolant.

He spat the taste onto the floor, then cracked open his wrist to shine his light scope up into the space. The coolant intakes had been crushed between the rear wall and the compression chamber. Ratchet wiggled back further into the space and strained to reach his scope up above the crushed hull section. There didn’t look like there was any further damage up above.

He slumped back to the floor.

“I do not like dramatic irony,” Ratchet muttered. The ship’s engine had the same problem he did—start up the engine again and it’d overheat because of the damaged coolant system. There weren’t any parts he could scavenge to do the same job. How much time did he have before the minefield blasted the ship again?

His plating was starting to feel uncomfortably warm and the engine had him trapped against the floor. _Get out before you toast yourself, Ratchet._ He eased his way back out from under the engine and into the red light of the engineering underlay. He needed those parts, or something like them. _Think, you fragger._ His mind felt stuffed thick with stabilization foam. There wasn’t the equipment to fabricate the parts on ship, even if he’d had the time.

...but this wasn’t the only ship nearby, was it? There was the wrecked Decepticon scout ship, just outside his cockpit. If there were any salvageable parts on board...well, they certainly weren’t using their engines, were they? Ratchet stowed the datapad with the schematics and rolled to his knees. New plan—get off the ship. Find another ship. Steal the parts. Make it back. Don’t die.

And hopefully the engine wouldn’t have already lost so much coolant that it wasn’t able to regulate the engine temperature and blew up the ship upon ignition. Ratchet climbed back up the ladder one-handed, trying to guess how much time he had left. His calculations kept dissolving half-formed and he decided it didn’t really matter anyway. He couldn’t go faster than he could go; either he’d find parts in time or his coolant system or his fuel pressure or the engine’s coolant supply would run out the clock. He heaved himself onto the cargo bay floor and crawled towards the airlock. At least Drift wasn’t with him; one sunny comment about Primus making sure everything worked out and Ratchet’d implode on the spot.

At the airlock he hauled himself back up one handed and opened up the emergency maintenance panel. Inside there were a pair of magnaclamps and a backpack propulsion unit; good for getting out into space and getting _back_ again. He got them both on after a minute of struggling with his useless arm. The jetpack had a pair of thrust controls to manage steering and acceleration, one for each hand. Given that he only had one reliable hand, he taped the other to the inside of his wrist. He’d be able to trigger it by pushing his arm against his leg.

That done, he turned to the airlock itself. He punched in the door open command and let it scan him for spark signature before the door slid open to admit him into the narrow space. He closed the door behind him and peered out the small window of the airlock into space. He could faintly see the glittering light of the NSP minefield, pinpricks of metallic reflections from the light of the system’s star. It was a dual-system minefield, he understood that much. The primary pulses continued with or without him, but the active weapons targeting was what had brought down the ship. He didn’t know what triggered it specifically—had it detected heat from the engine? Motion? Some more sophisticated detection system?

He wasn’t sure if that same detection system was going to hone in on him once he exited the ship.

“I promise, if I make it out of here, I will never turn off my phone again.” Ratchet muttered out of some superstitious compulsion. If only he hadn’t been such a fragging wimp and tried to hide from the announcement of Thunderclash’s death like a protoform that couldn’t grasp object permanence yet...if only he hadn’t been so tired that he couldn’t think straight and so emotionally exhausted that he couldn’t handle the slightest stress...if only he hadn’t ever let Drift leave. He didn’t know where he’d messed up, just that somewhere along the way he’d started out along the chain of terrible decisions that led him to this.

He triggered the decompression sequence and waited grimly for the doors to open. He kicked his magnaclamps against the floor to stop himself from lifting off unintended. A glittering starscape opened wide before him, only marred by the glitz of the orbiting deathtrap and flotsam of the greyed out Decepticon wreck.

No time for stargazing, he was on the clock. Ratchet unstuck his magnaclamps and accelerated slowly out of the airlock. No reaction from the surrounding minefield. Ratchet almost let out a sigh of relief before he remembered he was in a no-grav environment. Best keep one’s mouth shut when there were bits of you blown open and ready to boil off into the atmosphere. He’d seen it happen to bots who got shot in space and Ratchet was _not_ looking to leak _up_ into his intake.

He skirted the edge of his shuttle, as quick as the jetpack could take him. Outside the controlled atmosphere of the ship, he’d be overheating even faster. The idea that space was cold was based on a series of misconceptions—in a vacuum there was less matter in contact with your frame, able to absorb heat. And in orbit around a stellar system, there was plenty of cosmic radiation to warm you up.

As he rounded the edge of the port nacelle, the rest of the Decepticon wreck came into view.

The bit of wreckage that had pierced the shuttle’s cockpit was one of the skeletal struts of what must have been the ship’s core cabin. There were rows of benches filling the space, greyed out bots strapped into the ones that hadn’t been blown clear by the explosion. The entire starboard side of the cabin had been ripped away, nothing but twisted skeletal support beams left. Ratchet must have been right—age was reducing the power of the minefield. If he’d been hit by a blast like this Decepticon ship had taken there’d be nothing left of him or the shuttle.

He touched down on the wreck, kicking the magnaclamps on. Around him, genericon shells sat slumped in their seats, heads lolled over and bodies leaning against one another. He started towards the back of the cabin, where an open doorway would hopefully lead him towards the engineering area, when a sparkle of light caught his attention out of the corner of his eye.

 _Frag, not enough time._ He dropped to his knees and wrapped his arms over his head to shield himself from any loose debris that might come careening past while he was offline. He just had to hope whatever luck had carried him through before hadn’t run out yet.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, funny story, I've discovered a themesong for this fic while editing: [Beautiful Gas Mask](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApmZ7jNMNl0) by the Mountain Goats. I promise I had not heard it when I wrote/titled this story, the chorus is a complete coincidence.
> 
> We're now very close to the end indeed! The final chapter is a bit like an epilogue but you're going to want to stick around for our one (1) happy memory, coming up next week!

Hero wasn’t waiting at the door. That didn’t have to mean anything. He’d been roaming further afield these days; Ratchet figured he’d probably exhausted the skitterer population close to the Ratchet’s building. And Ratchet’s schedule was all slapdash and disorganized, it made sense that Hero wouldn’t just _know_ when to wait for Ratchet to let him in.

But when he called Hero, he didn’t come running like he always had before.

So Ratchet stayed home and laid in the dark, unable to recharge. Every few minutes he’d think there was some sound outside his door and drag himself off the berth to check for Hero. There was never anything there.

Sitting at his counter, he messaged all his friends asking if they could help him look. Well, he messaged Orion and Roller. Thunderclash was off-planet and Anodyne had never approved of him letting Hero roam the streets—even though Ratchet had explained over and over that Hero wasn’t a domestic cyberlynx he’d adopted, he was a feral creature who’d adopted _him_. He didn’t get anything from Orion, but Roller sent back a few concerned if fragmented replies. Apparently they were both in the middle of a time-sensitive security forces operation, but he very much hoped Ratchet would find Hero. _[maybe walk around a bit? he could have gotten stuck somewhere. you’ll feel better doing something],_ Roller suggested.

Roller was probably right—he might as well go looking, he wasn’t getting anything done lying awake and panicking.

Ratchet roamed the stairs of his building and then the surrounding buildings and then the streets between. He called for Hero on every street corner, spark in his throat. The night was was a murky and overcast, moisture thick in the air choking acidic fog. Hero had never not come when he called before.

Ratchet started knocking on doors, because maybe some kind-hearted mech had seen Hero and thought he was a stray? People didn’t take being woken to talk about some cyberlynx very calmly, as it turned out. The ones who didn’t slam the door on him with regarded him with pity and helpless shrugs.

Ratchet abandoned knocking on doors.

A security mech stopped him from climbing down into the drainage tunnels to look for Hero, clearly assuming he was overcharged out of his brain module. Upon realizing he’d nearly arrested the completely sober and emotionally overwrought CMO of Cybertron for public drunkenness, the mech retreated with a stream of flustered apologies. Apparently Ratchet was _above his paygrade_.

Eventually Ratchet collapsed on some stranger’s porch and called Anodyne. “Anodyne, I need your help,” he said, choking on a breath. “Hero’s missing.”

“Oh.” Anodyne’s voice was strangely inflected, Ratchet thought.

The dead air of silence stretched out and Ratchet had to say something. “I know you disapprove of me letting Hero outside, but I need—”

“Ratchet, Hero’s fine.”

“What?” Ratchet jolted up.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t want to have this conversation over the phone. Did your schedule change again? You weren’t supposed to get home for hours.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Hero’s at my flat,” Anodyne continued. “And I’m breaking up with you.”

“What?”

“Is this really a surprise? Are you that oblivious? Did you not even notice how miserable I was?”

Ratchet dragged himself back to his feet, head reeling. “Wait, wait, go back. Why do you have my cat?”

“Forget about the cat!” Anodyne screamed. “I’m taking Hero because you’re obviously _incapable_ of taking care of him. He could have been run over or worse, you barely remember to feed him, your apartment is such a disaster that it’s barely safer than the street. You can’t even take care of yourself, Ratchet, you don’t have the...the emotional resources to take care of Hero too.”

“He’s not your property, you can’t just take him—”

“Ratchet, this is for your own good, and Hero’s. And mine. I thought things would get better. You promised they’d get better. But you just spiral deeper and deeper and I can’t handle it anymore. I love Hero, you know that. I’ll take care of him for you. And you can have the space to take care of yourself.”

Ratchet’s vision fogged up and he squeezed his hands into fists. “Please, just give him back, Anodyne. I need him,” he begged.

“You don’t even care that I’m leaving, do you? I don’t mean anything to you. Primus, I thought I could fix you, but you’re just beyond belief. You’re the CMO! You’re supposed to be the smartest doctor on the planet! And you’ve got the emotional intelligence of a...a scraplet! Ratchet, I’ve only got one piece of advice left for you—get over yourself.”

Anodyne hung up.

 

* * *

 

Ratchet checked his chrono again and picked up the pace, ducking past some nurses and into the back hallway. If he didn’t get held up anywhere, he’d have enough time to refuel before the M&M meeting. He’d been feeling so anxious about his presentation when he’d gotten in that morning that he hadn’t refueled at all, for fear he’d hurl on public transit. Six hours on his feet dealing with patients had definitely shifted his anxious-nausea to actual hunger.

As Ratchet approached the resident’s breakroom, he could hear the soft murmur of voices. Someone said something and everyone laughed in response. When he stepped inside it was like something had sucked all the air out of the room, leaving them all silent.

Ratchet walked past the occupied table to the counter by the back where the energon dispenser was located. Lurch and Dextro and their friends, he noted. They were all expected to attend the meeting, so hopefully they weren’t planning on hanging around in the breakroom too long. Of course, it wasn’t going to be very much _fun_ now that Ratchet was here, was it?

He measured himself out a cube and sat down at the counter, setting his datapad out so he could review his presentation. The rest of them sat there awkwardly, like they couldn’t just finish their damned conversation in his presence. Ratchet sighed. He wasn’t going to yell at anyone. He’d promised himself; rise above, just like Thunders always said. Cordial, polite, model the sort of behavior he wanted to see.

Ratchet looked over his shoulder and said, “Look, whenever any of you want to act like professionals, I’m ready. I promise I won’t hold a grudge.”

They stared back at him in silence. Ratchet waited a moment, then shrugged. “Look, just offering.”

He went back to his presentation, trying to run over what questions the panelists might try and ask him. It wasn’t a hard case, measured by its technical aspects. But Panax was holding him to a higher standard than a normal resident, ‘prepared’ simply wasn’t good enough. Ratchet needed to be flawless. The other residents seemed to have finished up, slowly making their way to dump their empty glasses in the washing up area and shuffling out. Ratchet checked his chrono. Probably should be heading up soon.

He downed the rest of his fuel and set the glass aside, making a mental note to clean up when he got back from the meeting. He hurried back to the elevator, only to be hit by a out-of-order sign. With a sigh, Ratchet jogged back to the secondary staff elevator and mashed the up button. The mech that was already waiting there, medical airlift by his stripes, watched him with a small smile. Ratchet nodded back. No point in making the people that didn’t already dislike him think he was antisocial.

The door chimed and Ratchet stepped through, making a beeline for the floor controls. He jammed his floor on the keypad and then asked over his shoulder, “What floor for you?”

“Top floor,” the mech said. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Ratchet said, smiling at the mech. The mech smiled back and wow, he was handsome. Not that Ratchet would ogle a mech on the job, but it wasn’t ogling just to think someone’s face looked gorgeous, right? Though maybe any mech smiling at Ratchet would have melted him at this point, he was running on pure anxiety.

The doors slid closed and the elevator started moving. Ratchet looked away to stare at the floor numbers.

There was an awful squealing sound and Ratchet jumped. He and the other mech glanced at each other as the noise repeated itself and then the elevator slammed to a halt. The lights flickered out and Ratchet groaned.

“Slag,” the other mech muttered. “Is the control panel still working?”

Ratchet tapped at it. Nothing. “Nope,” he said miserably, before sinking to the floor to cover his face with his hands.

“Slag, that is inconvenient,” the mech said. “I’ll call maintenance and see what’s happening.”

There was a long stretch of silence, and then the mech spoke into his comm. “Yes, I’m in elevator S3 and we’ve gotten stuck. Um, no. No, there was no sign. I’m sorry, sir, I’m not trying to be an inconvenience...well, how long will it be until you can get us out of here?” A long silence. “I see. I’ll be available at this frequency if anything changes. Thank  you.”

“How long’s it going to be?” Ratchet asked.

“Two hours, at least. Apparently this elevator was supposed to be down for maintenance. And you looked like you were in a hurry. That sucks.”

“I was supposed to present at the M&M meeting today,” Ratchet moaned. “I’m going to be in so much trouble.”

“Am I supposed to know what that is?” The mech said. “Sorry, this isn’t my normal floor. I usually stick to the landing bay.” There was a soft shuffling sound and then a light lit the space; the mech had turned on his headlights. He smiled again, a bit apologetically this time, and offered Ratchet a hand to shake. “Since we might be here awhile, might as well introduce myself. Anodyne of Kaon, I work in medical transport.”

“Ratchet.” He he shook the mech’s hand. “I’m a resident, first year.”

“Oh, so you’re, like, a doctor doctor? You’re not missing out on, surgery or something, right? Nobody’s dying?”

“No, no,” Ratchet said, “it’s nothing like that. Morbidity and mortality conference, the residents meet with their faculty mentors to cover patient cases that had unexpected complications or a patient death, we walk through the care provided, see if whatever went wrong was avoidable. I was supposed to be one of the presenting residents today.”

“Oh,” Anodyne considered this, then frowned at Ratchet. “Are you actually going to be in trouble for missing it? I mean, elevator breaking isn’t exactly your fault.”

“I’m absolutely going to get in trouble,” Ratchet said, leaning up against the corner of the elevator. Now that he’d processed that fact, he was beginning to grow resigned to it. “My faculty mentor is Panax and he hates me, so any excuse is a good excuse. And I can’t even send him a message, he never checks his messages during meetings.”

“ _Panax_? The hospital administrator is your _faculty mentor_?” Anodyne squeaked.

“Yeah, it’s not great,” Ratchet said. “He hates me.”

“...maybe he’s just not very personable? I’ve met him twice and he looked pretty intimidating,” Anodyne offered.

“Nah, he hates me. He’s convinced I somehow cheated on my placement exams, probably because I scored better than he did back when _he_ was in medical school. He assigned me to himself just so he’d have more opportunities to catch me out as a fraud.” Ratchet shrugged. “And he’s not really subtle about it. All the other residents have definitely noticed.”

Ratchet considered, for a moment, the ‘out of order’ sign posted on the main elevator. “Actually, this is probably them,” he decided. “I bet one of my coworkers switched that out of order sign from _this_ elevator onto the main elevator so they could trick me into getting stuck in a broken elevator. They knew I was the last one on the floor. Frag.” He banged his fist against the wall. “That is messed up. They fragging sabotaged me so I’d miss my presentation and get in trouble.”

“That seems pretty speculative,” Anodyne said. “Are you sure this isn’t just bad luck?”

“Well, I can’t be sure, can I? That’s the point.” Ratchet said. “But it wouldn’t be the first time. Frag. Sorry you got caught up in it.”

“It’s okay,” Anodyne said, “I mean, I was on break. I already sent a message to my boss, but it sounds like we’ll get free before I’m back on shift. I still can’t believe you have Panax as your mentor. The mech hasn’t done a direct mentorship in two centuries, he’s got more surgical experience than any bot outside the Primal Vanguard. It sucks that he’s awful, I mean, but _still_.”

“Oh no, I know. Sometimes when he forgets to be awful I can see what a good mentor he could be.” Ratchet paused, searching for an example and was surprised to find one immediately at hand. “He had me working in the Cybercrosis ward this month and I was handling a late-stage patient’s palliative care. That’s how I got my assignment for the M&M meeting. I can see the logic in it—your first patient death is somebody that _nobody_ could save.”

“Must’ve been hard, still,” Anodyne said. He scooted over to Ratchet’s side of the elevator. “I know the first time we lifted in and the patient was already gone, that killed me. I mean, apparently he was dead within minutes of them making the call, we were still on the other side of the city. But it still messed me up.”

“Thanks,” Ratchet said. “Death sucks, that’s pretty much my take. But I had a good friend to help me through it.”

“Oh?” Anodyne said.

“Yeah, wait a sec, I’ll find you a picture.” Ratchet powered his datapad on and scrolled through his photo album. “Okay, this isn’t the best picture of him, but it’s okay.” He held up the datapad.

“A...cyberlynx? You have a pet cyberlynx?” Anodyne smiled. “Man, he is really cute.”

“His name’s Hero, he adopted me,” Ratchet said. “Wait, I’ll find you a video of him, I know I have some videos of him saved on this thing...”

 

* * *

 

“Ratch! I’ve got a fader!”

Ratchet pushed himself to his feet and bolted to the berth by the front door, where Roller was settling a greying patient. Roller saw him and patted at the patient helplessly. “Slag, Ratch, you’ve got to help him. Wandered right in the middle of a shootout between Security and a gang of organ thieves, I got him straight through the chest. Slag, Ratch, I didn’t mean to do it—”

“Roller, calm down and step back,” Ratchet said. He unspooled a line of cabling and uncovered the bot’s medical port to hook him in. The stats that flashed up on the monitor weren’t good, but they weren’t unsalvageable. “Okay, spark shrinking fast but you didn’t actually _hit_ the spark or the t-cog. I can do this.” Ratchet folded into his alt mode and popped the back hatch. “Roller, I need to give him a full charge from my reboot coils. You need to grab the main cable and get it hooked into his primary recharge port.”

Roller hurried to comply, getting the reboot coil hooked in with a bit of awkward newbie fumbling. Ratchet gunned the engine, monitoring the medical readouts on his internal HUD until the spark readings stabilized out. “Okay, Roller, unhook me.”

He transformed back and started grabbing cables, getting every system he could hooked up to life support. There wasn’t much cause for _emergency_ medical treatment at this clinic. Mechs who were dying that fast usually couldn’t get to him in time. But he did more than enough of it in his day job for the motions to be automatic. Once the patient was stabilized, Ratchet cracked his chassis open to get a look at the damage. Roller was still lurking behind him, rubbing his hands together. Looking in need of a something to do.

“Hey, could you grab some parts for me?” Ratchet said, nodding back over his shoulder. “By the back wall, there’s a set of open cabinets with part labels on them. Just bring me the whole cases labeled “upper circulatory“ and the one labeled “thermal regulators“. Don’t look if you’re feeling squeamish.”

Ratchet hadn’t intended to go into business as a junker when he started the clinic. But the clinic was supposed to be _off the books_ , which made ordering parts through official channels tricky. And a lot of patients, there just wasn’t much you could do with them. Ratchet was sure to get verbal consent about returning their parts to his stock before they faded, or try to ascertain their desired burial type. Most of them were plenty willing to let Ratchet have the parts—apparently bots were less squeamish about donating frames in Dead End. Which made a certain amount of sense, given that a lot of them had done stints as Relinquishment Clinic donors.

Roller set the cases out and Ratchet rifled through them, comparing part sizes and specs to find a decent fit. Then the parts had to be sanitized and the wound cleaned and the replacements made and some fuel infused to make up what was missing. All in all, a twenty minute project from start to finish. Ratchet had Roller lift the bot onto one of his recovery berths; he’d leave him on life support at least until he woke up.

Finally, he turned to Roller. “You’re supposed to be back at work and you’re hanging around here instead. Is there something you need to talk about?”

“I thought you’d want an update on Orion,” Roller said, his gaze flicking over to the few waiting patients. Ratchet waved Roller over to his back office and closed the door behind them.

“So, what’s the news?” Ratchet asked.

“He’s alive,” Roller said.

“Okay,” Ratchet said. “That’s not much information, but it’s good news. Is he out of prison?”

“Some senator bailed him out, had him fixed up. Orion told me he had him _modified_ , but I don’t know what he means by that. Looks about the same to me.”

“Okay,” Ratchet said again. He shuffled the datapads on his desk, stacking them into neat piles.

“Is that all you’ve got to say, Ratch?”

“What do you _want_ me to have to say, Roller?” Ratchet sat down on his desk in the space he’d cleared. “Orion made a stupid decision, he got in trouble and some stranger got him out of trouble. What do you want me to do about it? I don’t control Orion and he doesn’t clear his decisions by me, especially not the stupid ones.”

“I was hoping you’d offer to take a look at him, make sure this senator creep didn’t do anything weird.”

“Orion wants me to give him a look, I’ll do it. He can drop by here any time.”

“What is your problem, Ratch?” Roller grabbed him by the arm with bruising force and then froze, slowly releasing him. “Slag, I’m sorry. I’m scared as the Pit right now, I don’t know what’s happening. Everything just seems to be spiraling out of control.”

Ratchet jerked his thumb towards the waiting room behind him. “Go take a survey out there, you’ll find out how bad things have already gotten. You know, Orion once said to me that it felt like the world was balanced on the edge of a knife, ready to crumble. I just didn’t think it was going to happen so soon.”

“Hug?” Roller asked.

Ratchet jumped down off the table and pulled Roller into a hug. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, big guy, but we’re going to make it through together, okay? If you want Orion to get down here, you’ve got to nag him for me. He doesn’t do anything I tell him.”

Roller squeezed back and lifted Ratchet off the floor. “Thanks, Ratch,” Roller said. After a long moment Roller finally set Ratchet back down and made his goodbyes, promising to drag Orion back to the clinic soon.

Ratchet waved him off, then gave himself a moment to emotionally collapse before he had to go out and see his patients. He had to be solid for Roller, he didn’t need both of his friends melting down at the same time. But Orion...Ratchet didn’t understand this person Orion seemed to be turning into. But there wasn’t any way he could see to stop him, so he was just going to have to stand by him.

Wherever this was leading.

 

* * *

 

“Who are these?” Ratchet demanded, pointing at the motley crew of red and white strangers who’d appeared in his medibay. He knew _what_ they were, obviously, but since nobody had bothered to tell him there’d be new trainees coming, he figured he should get the satisfaction of being a hardass about it to _someone._

Quicktouch, ward nurse, looked over at Ratchet with a withering glare. “They’re the new trainees. MTO rejects. I’m having them stripping down and sanitizing parts until you have time to work them into the duty roster.”

Ratchet nodded curtly. “If you see any of the higher ups, remind them that I am _CMO_ and am to be _informed_ before these kinds of decisions are made. Carry on.”

He stomped back over to his workbench, where he’d set up his comconsole and was working on figuring out their supplies for the coming offensive. There just wasn’t enough _fuel_ , there never was. And every mech in the science division was too busy working on new ways to kill people to work on any of his numerous requests for better tools, improved pain blockers and stimulants and more efficient ways to synthesize necessary transplant parts. The numbers just didn’t add up and he didn’t see how he could make things stretch to cover the gap.

“Look, just say out of his way and you’ll do fine.” Ratchet caught a low murmur from the other side of the room and sought out the speaker with a sidelong look. Quicktouch, talking to one of the nervous looking newbies. “Yeah, he’s antisocial and he’s got a mean streak. But if you steer clear of him and follow the rules, he’s not going to have cause to dismiss you.”

Was that what they were telling new recruits now? Ratchet tried to muster up a bit of a fuck and couldn’t seem to. It was for the best, really. If they didn’t make an effort he wouldn’t have to either, and then he wouldn’t have to memorize a new set of names for the soon-to-be-dead.

 

* * *

 

He woke up surrounded by the enemy dead on either side, heat building on his plating and a roiling anger building in his spark. Ratchet lay there as the frustration built to a tsunami behind his teeth and he finally snapped.

“Whatever corner of my brain is orchestrating this _grand show_ could knock it off any time,” he shouted. Vacuum rushed to replace the pressurized air that had filled his intake and Ratchet coughed. He dragged his knees off the ground and stomped to his feet as his insides protested the sudden absence of internal pressure. Ratchet rounded on his empty spectators. “I know I messed up! I know _I’m_ messed up! I went on this journey to start putting things to rights and I can’t do that when I’m being fragging _hounded_ by every mistake I’ve ever made.”

He wrapped his arms around his chest, pulling tight around the surgical patch. He was sick of going it alone. He was sick of needing help and never getting any. He was sick of being so scared of people letting him down that he pushed them away first. He was sick of it.

But if he wanted to get to Drift he was going to have to save himself, by himself, one more time.

Ratchet had already found the engine room before the thought occurred to him that the reason he kept waking up might have been that he’d disabled his recharge initiation sequence when he was trying to stop sleeping. It’d be a pretty solid way to kill a Cybertronian, by trapping them in a wake-sleep infinite loop until you burned out the brain module. They probably weren’t betting on having to kill the sort of idiot who disabled his primary protocols to escape necessary bodily functions.

Of course, that was both pure supposition and entirely beside the point, because he was _supposed_ to be working on disassembling an engine. And boiling was probably a more likely mechanism of death than brain failure at this point.

Working with only one hand with functioning pressure sensitivity reminded him unpleasantly of his years struggling against form fatigue. At least he had one hand working normally. The engines weren’t the same dimensions, but the coolant intakes had the same fittings, the threads a familiar gauge. He’d make it work.

In the engine room he checked his and the jetpack’s fuel levels again. He was still losing fuel, presumably working its way into the pore spaces of the stabilizing foam. He took another fuel booster and headed back towards his ship. From this angle the sun lit against the minefield’s modules, glittering beacons that were easy to pick out. He could make out the edge of the minefield, not far out from where his ship was trapped. It’d only take a bit of a boost to get him out of range...

Ratchet hurried himself back to the airlock as fast as the jetpack could take him, all discretion thrown to the winds. Haste was the important thing; he didn’t know how much time he had. He’d briefly considered trying to raid the Decepticon empties for the parts _he_ needed, but they were all brittle from repeated freeze-thaws. Luckily the engine had been kept safe in a thermal isolation chamber.

He was already unlatching the magnaclamps in the airlock, stumping into the ship with one of them still attached and magnetizing him to the ship’s surface. He ripped off the tape holding the jetpack controls to his arm and shrugged the pack off his shoulders, then unlatched the stubborn magnaclamp, leaving everything strewn about the cargobay as he hustled towards the hatch into engineering, the coolant intakes held tight against his side with his right arm.

He took the ladder at a jump, regretting the decision almost instantly as the pain shot up his right side like lightning on impact. “Frag. _Learning_ from mistakes, Ratchet.”

He knelt and rolled himself awkwardly onto his back, squirming into the crawlspace under the engine. The puddle of coolant had spread and deepened to half a fingers’ depth, not a great sign. Ratchet wedged himself into the back of the space and examined the crushed area. The actual hull of the ship had compressed in on the engine, pressed tight against the much-stronger fuel tank. Ratchet was going to need to make room in order to install the replacement parts and check on the rest of the engine.

He considered the problem. If he had a jack or something that was strong enough he could push the hull back; it wasn’t a combat shuttle, the hull was pretty flexible. But he didn’t have anything strong enough. If he’d been there Rodimus would probably have tried shoving his hand in the space and wedging it open at risk of mangling his hand. Ratchet didn’t think that would work and he wasn’t about to risk his one good hand to try it.

But that thought triggered a different idea. Ratchet sighed. He was going to have to run the length of the ship and back again; a task that didn’t usually sound this _exhausting._

He wiggled his way out and hauled himself back up the ladder, one excruciating step at a time. Then he limped to the doorway into the corridor and from the corridor back into the cockpit.

He rooted through the portable medbay for supplies, grabbing a few absorbent towels while he was at it and dumping the used fuel boosters. He checked his monitor levels and then decided to go ahead with a neurex saturate injection, which had him jittering within seconds. Better than dropping from shock, though he didn’t like the way the drug made the edges of his vision seem to come alive. He dragged his haul back with him to the cargo bay and down the ladder.

Then he was wriggling back under the engine and squeezing into the compacted space with the nozzle of his expanding surgical foam. It was dangerous stuff, surgical foam. He’d never trust a trainee with it, it was just too damned easy to use a little bit too much and crack the patient’s chestplate open when it expanded. Same principle applied here, but there was no such thing as _too much_. Ratchet sprayed and waited as the foam bulged and bubbled over the edges of the application area. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the hull lift up with a creak of bending metal.

He let the foam stay in place for a count of sixty, then got out the enzyme that would dissolve it down into a liquid. He clamped down his ventilation intakes and closed his mouth tight before spraying, ducking his head to avoid getting the sluice of dissolved coolant-coated foam in his optics. The smell was vile, but some things never changed. Ratchet used one of the cloths to mop up the back of his helm and then dumped all of the cloths he’d brought onto the floor, where they’d hopefully soak up most of the puddle while he worked.

In the newly cleared space, Ratchet opened up his laser scalpel again and cut out the crushed pieces. He used one of his sanitizing cloths to scrub off the connection points, then applied a bit of thread-seal tape to make sure the pieces held tight. The intakes threaded on smooth and Ratchet relaxed a little more. One of his many worst-case scenarios averted—turns out his ship and the Decepticon shuttle _were_ using comparable measurement standards. He hooked the intakes into the incoming lines above, then dragged his diagram out again to check that the wiring was put back in place correctly. The engine diagnostics section told him to check that the heat sinks were still undamaged, which as far as he could tell they were.

Finally, there seemed to be nothing left to do but clear out and run a engine test and hope there was enough coolant left to run the system. Ratchet ran a self-diagnostic first and groaned when he saw that his active fuel levels had dipped back below 30%. Had he missed clamping one of the lines? He was leaking like a fucking sieve. His right arm was too wobbly to seat the fuel booster in his port and he gave up with a huff of frustration. His temperature was still within the margin of safety, though he felt downright chilly with his vents held open as wide as they could go and the fans running full blast.

Ratchet settled himself at the panel and queued up a safety check before a horrible thought occurred to him. What if the way the minefield had targeted the ship initially was based on its engine signature? If Ratchet powered it all the way up what was going to stop it from blasting them again?

How was he supposed to get out of here without using the engine?

The console began blinking yellow at him, warning him that the system was low on coolant, only safe for another 150 hours of full-power operation. That wasn’t near as bad as he’d expected, he’d be able to reach the nearest space station on that. No other warnings popped up, so hopefully nothing was going to explode when they reached full power.

The planet’s warning system had claimed the minefield triggered based on propulsion, whatever that was supposed to mean. It certainly hadn’t been triggered by Ratchet zooming around with the booster pack, so the difference had to either be mass or some sort of engine detection. Of course, maybe the warning had been a lie and the explosive charges were triggered by contact and the shuttle had bumped into one. Then the only challenge would be backing out of the minefield without bumping into any of the tiny explosive objects that were too small to register on the nav console.

Ratchet rubbed at his helm. No way out. Frag, he only needed a little push to get—

Ratchet startled. Of course. Frag, he was running slow today. After this was all done he was going to bunk down for the longest recharge ever. The jitters and the anxiety had been keeping the fuzzy feeling in his head mostly at bay, but he couldn’t stand being this slow. With a hum of victory he programmed the engine to ramp itself up to full power in ten minutes. That would hopefully be enough time to get this done.

He dragged himself back up the ladder one more time, then over to where he’d left his magnaclamps and jetpack. He got everything put back on and rolled out into the airlock, waited impatiently for it to spit him out into space again. He had an _idea._

He locked his magnaclamps to the surface of the shuttle and hiked towards the front. From the top of the ship he had a pretty good view of the mines surrounding the ship, orbiting in sync. They were pretty sparse from what he could see. He climbed down to the viewport of the shuttle then slid down its smooth surface, powering on the jetpack to slow his fall. He played with the thrusters until he was stable alongside the piece of wreckage jammed into his ship.

He braced his knees against the lower edge of the viewport, then planted his hands on the surface. Now all he had to do was _push_.

Ratchet shoved the triggers against the glass, his right arm crumpling under the force as the jetpack kicked up and tried to throw him through the glass. The viewport vibrated under him and for a second Ratchet worried the pack’s thrust just wouldn’t be enough to move something with so much _mass _. Then the glass began to scrape along the beam, slowly sliding free of it. Ratchet grinned.__

Tearing his optics from the only evidence of actual progress, Ratchet craned his neck to keep an eye on the minefield ahead of them. Slowly, slowly, the ship slipped free of the wreckage trapping it.

Ratchet leaned a little harder on the controls, pushing the engines harder. The last of the heat-warped metal slid free, little globules of Ratchet’s fuel floating off its surface and into space. In its wake, the protective forcefield sealed shut with a pop. They still weren’t moving very fast, but based on the trajectories of the closest mines, Ratchet was pretty sure they could skate back into the safety of far orbit.

His HUD started flashing low fuel warnings at him and Ratchet gritted his teeth. Slowly, silently, the ship slid further and further from the main mass of the minefield and towards safety. There’d be no stopping it now, even if a mine appeared out of the dark in their path. He powered the jetpack back down. With his good hand, he reached up for the top of the viewport and lifted, balancing his toes on the edge of the hole in the viewport. The forcefield was holding atmospheric pressure inside, but it gave under his feet, pushing in like a soap bubble. Ratchet leaned against the roof of the shuttle and watched safety grow near.

His internal countdown ticked towards zero and Ratchet swung himself down through the hole in the viewport, the forcefield bubbling up again behind him as he slid down the console surface and caught himself on the pilot’s chair.

He slumped against the chair, popping his vents back open and revving his fans up as high as they’d go. As he watched, the hum of the engine started kicked in and then rose into a reassuring whine. The cockpit lights flashed and then lit bright. The console powered up with a cheery message about ‘proper shutdown procedures’.

Ratchet started laughing. Laughing fucking _hurt_ , but he just couldn’t seem to stop, optics overheating and blurring up as he brought the navigation and flight plan screen up and told the autopilot to abandon the gravity assist maneuver and fly straight to their destination. Ratchet made sure autopilot was engaged and that fuel levels and the engine tests hadn’t come back with any serious warnings.

Then, chuckles still bubbling up uncontrollably, he swayed over to the medstation and plugged himself in. He zipped through internal processes in diagnostic mode until he found the recharge initiation sequence and set things back to rights. He considered patching himself up and decided he was too tired to deal with that—he’d just go recharge and deal with the mess from the leak later.

Through the viewport he could see the planet that nearly fragging killed him turn back into a tiny point of light and then disappear. There was energon and broken glass all over the floor and medical supplies strewn everywhere. “A problem for future me,” Ratchet declared, turning the cooling up to full blast and dropping the jetpack on the floor with the rest of the junk. He kicked the magnaclamps off, then stumbled out into his berthroom. He opened up the fuel infuser case one handed and just barely managed to get himself hooked up and horizontal on the berth before he slipped off into recharge.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter! Thanks for sticking it out, y'all. I've just started my new job and I definitely have (a lot) less time open for writing now, but I've also got a lot of ideas so I'm sure things will work out somehow. This is definitely not the end!

“Sorry, the room’s at capacity.”

Doublecross squinted at Ratchet in confusion. “Since when is there a limit to the number of people in Swerve’s? And since when are you a doorman?”

Ratchet shrugged. “Condition of Swerve getting to keep the bar, apparently. Ultra Magnus did a lot of math and determined a safe maximum occupancy. I’m watching the door because this is apparently Magnus’s favorite song.”

Doublecross crossed his arms, which was always a funny sight, given that he had dragon heads ending each arm. He looked pretty disappointed. Ratchet took pity on him.

“Thunderclash isn’t doing autographs anyway,” Ratchet said. “Swing by in an hour or two; either folks will have filtered out or Magnus will have crashed.”

He waved the mech off and closed the door again, slouching against it as he surveyed the room. The dancefloor was still crowded and people looked like they were having fun. There was a crowd thronging around the bar and another loitering near Blaster’s setup, trying to get their songs on the setlist. The banner was a little lopsided and the rest of the streamers were hung even more haphazardly. A pretty good party, he’d have said.

It took him a few seconds to find Thunderclash in the room, squeezed in one of the booths at the back. He’d been social-butterflying about for most of the party, making nice and shaking hands and being game to try dancing even though it was the only thing he’d never been good at. Now he was talking to...Drift? Thunderclash apparently actually knew and cared about Drift’s hippy religion, so that was good. Ratchet figured all of Drift’s babbling about religion in _his_ direction was probably because he didn’t have any actual outlet to talk about that slag. Thunderclash was _perfect_ , he was interested in absolutely anything if the person talking to him was passionate.

They looked happy. Ratchet crossed his arms and realized, rather to his surprise, that the thought didn’t inspire the familiar curl of jealousy he’d gotten used to watching Thunders living his life with other, more interesting, people. They seemed to be having a nice time. He was glad. He smiled and went back to watching the dancers.

Ultra Magnus strode back over, a comically tiny drink in hand. He hadn’t been _dancing_ , exactly, but Ratchet had caught him swaying with an appreciative look on his face. He gave Magnus a little wave and the Enforcer nodded back. “Thank you for holding the line,” Magnus said.

Ratchet looked around. Was he...was there a line somewhere that he’d—

“It was an attempt at figurative language,” Magnus interrupted his train of thought, looking rather awkward. “I’ve been told my speech patterns are overly rigid, but I find my attempts to loosen them tends to bewilder people.”

“Maybe try practicing with a small pool of people first?” Ratchet suggested. “That way they know you’re trying to practice and they’re not caught off guard.”

Magnus considered for a moment. “A practicable suggestion. I will think on it. You could rejoin the party, I will take over monitoring crowd capacity.”

“Thanks Magnus,” Ratchet said, before sliding off around the edges of the crowd to get back to the bar.

Ratchet waved at Swerve and got his drink refilled, then migrated to the corner of the room furthest from the thronging dancers. He sipped at his engex and tried not to regret having organized such a _big_ party. Thunderclash and the rest of the Vis Vitalis crew were going to be leaving soon. He didn’t know when Thunders and him would get a chance to catch up. But while welcoming Thunders aboard with a tiny party in his habsuite would have been tempting, it wouldn’t have been fair to Thunders _or_ the crew. They all deserved to have a nice time.

“A lot on your mind?” Thunderclash asked, before throwing an arm over Ratchet’s shoulder. “You look too serious for a party, Ratch.”

“Just not really my scene,” Ratchet admitted.

Thunderclash shrugged. “I don’t think it’s _my scene_ either, but I’m managing not to look funereal at my welcome party...I’m managing, right Ratch?” Thunders asked, emotion leaking a bit out the seams.

Ratchet threw an arm around his waist. “You? Everyone loves you, you’re great. You _are_ doing okay, right? You just looked so chipper, I didn’t want to postpone the party or anything, but you did nearly get assassinated today.” And, unspoken: _a mech you trusted turned out to be a traitor and a stranger._ Thunders trusted too hard. He always had and maybe he always would and maybe it was stupid to think that a party surrounded by overtanked idiots was going to make him feel better.

Thunderclash wiped his hand over his face and ex-vented. “I’m getting there. I’ll get there.” He smiled at Ratchet. “I am enjoying the party, I’ve gotten a chance to meet so many fine mechs. Like your third officer—Drift? You know him, I assume.”

Ratchet rolled his optics. “Yeah, I know him.”

“Of course you do, you’re ship’s medic. You know everyone. I was quite grateful to get a chance to meet your Drift. Quite well spoken and very well informed on the various religious theories surrounding the Knights, he had a lot of wisdom to share about the quest. And a surprising amount to say about _you_.”

“What?”

Thunderclash chuckled. “Oh, nothing scandalous or anything. He’d noticed that we seemed like friends when we’d met up in the captain’s suite and wanted me to encourage _you_ to take better care of yourself. This is me, by the way, informing you that you should take better care of yourself. As promised. Not that I suspect you’ll listen.”

“Don’t listen to Drift, he’s an oversensitive softie.”

“He’s an ex-Decepticon,” Thunderclash said mildly. “If he says you play fast and loose with your personal safety and well-being to the benefit of others, I expect he means it. Honestly, Ratchet, and I mean this as gently as I can put it—you’re the sort of mech who doesn’t like the unfamiliar. You enjoy routine, and that’s not a bad thing. But if being _uncomfortable_ or self-destructive has become the familiar...you should get out of your comfort zone more.”

“Well, if that’s as gently as you can put it,” Ratchet said. “I’m not suicidal, if that’s what he told you.”

“It wasn’t,” Thunderclash said. “But I am very worried that you think he would have.”

Ratchet sighed. “Look, it’s nothing. I don’t want to waste the time we have together talking about me.”

“That would never be a waste of time, old friend,” Thunderclash said, with crushing intensity. “But this is not the venue to discuss such things, and this is time to let loose. Let go. Enjoy ourselves.”

“I’ve never been good at parties,” Ratchet said. “And I can’t dance.”

“You’d never guess who just tried to tell me the same lie,” Thunders said with a smile. Then he waved at someone, dragging them over by sheer force of personality. Drift, looking fairly awkward and hanging onto a mostly empty glass for cover. “Drift, I think I’ve found you a dance partner.”

“What?” Ratchet said. “No way.”

Thunderclash plucked the glass out of his hand, then started making shooing motions at him. “You can’t dance, Drift can’t dance, and both of you wish you were enjoying the party. Go enjoy it together! Be bad at something, enjoy making mistakes! Get out of your comfort zone.”

Drift, who had initially protested something about not wanting to be an imposition or some slag, got sucked along with Thunderclash’s enthusiasm. He offered up his empty glass freely and then offered Ratchet both hands with a ridiculous wiggle of his hips. “Wanna make fools of ourselves, Ratch?” He said with a toothy grin.

“I do not.”

“We can pretend you were overcharged and you don’t even remember it,” Drift promised.

“Go,” Thunders said, pushing him on. “We can talk after. You’ll have fun once you’re doing it.”

“Whatever,” Ratchet said, taking Drift’s hands in his. They were warm—speedsters ran hot. “You know nobody else is partner dancing.”

“Partner dancing is the easiest kind,” Drift said, scooting them backwards towards the crowd. “You just sorta mirror and sway. Easy.”

“I’m going to step on you,” Ratchet warned.

“You can _try_ , but I’m definitely faster than you.”

 

* * *

 

 

Ratchet’s optics powered up lazily, and he struggled to adjust to the sudden darkness after the present _nearness_ of Swerve’s brightly lit bar. That was...well it certainly wasn’t bad. Ratchet could live with dreams like that.

He stayed in his berth and ran a self-diagnostic from there. Hadn’t leaked too much overnight, so that was a good sign. He still had to get up and...there were a lot of things that needed doing. All over the ship. But it wouldn't hurt any of them too bad if he relaxed for a few more minutes, tried to float back into the feel of the memory he’d left behind. He was still floating high on the satisfaction of getting away with it; a certain amount of euphoria after escaping certain death seemed understandable.

Eventually he got himself upa and the pain staggered him again. He’d nearly forgotten about the torn sensornet, lying there. He limped out into the chaos of the shuttle’s cockpit and sat down in one of the chairs and stared around him. A lot of things that needed doing. What needed doing first?

He decided that synthesizing transplants for his missing pieces was probably his primary concern. He limped back and forth between the cockpit and his hab, dragging back some of the necessary supplies that he’d brought along and set up a basic synthesis machine. Generating transplant sensornet was a fiddly business and he’d figured out long ago how to automate the first part of the process. He queued up the parts that needed replacing and let the machine trundle along.

While it went about its business, Ratchet took the time to clean up the cockpit a bit. There was fuel and broken glass everywhere and Ratchet really preferred a gore-free living space. But by the time he was patching the viewport he admitted he was mostly trying to delay the inevitable moment when he had to check the subspace messaging system again. Which was one of the many things that had gotten him into this problem in the first place.

“You should get out of your comfort zone more,” Ratchet parroted, easing himself back into his chair. Doing that much housework while you were _missing pieces_ wasn’t the smartest move he’d ever made, but at least it hadn’t landed him in a orbiting death trap. So, not his worst decision in the past 48 hours.

He turned the system on and was rather startled by the display informing him there were twelve messages for him to listen to. _Who..._ he decided that, even though every inch of him was pulling him to procrastinate as much as he physically could, he was going to listen to the messages in chronological order. So, the Vis Vitalis messages first.

The first message was exactly what he’d feared—another message about Thunderclash’s ever worsening health, urging anyone who needed to visit to come and pay their last respects while there was still time. Ratchet hung frozen over the continue prompt for a moment, then forced himself to continue.

The second message was nothing like he’d expected. For one thing, it opened with some mech Ratchet didn’t know saying “Excellent news! Thunderclash has been cured!” and then got stranger from there. Somehow the Lost Light was involved. There was something about parasitic monsters who’d murdered several crewmembers. Thunderclash had apparently elected to join the crew of the Lost Light, freed from the Vis Vitalis’s life support capabilities.

Ratchet wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Scratch that, Ratchet wasn’t sure how he felt about _anything_. The idea of Thunderclash being both _alive_ and on the _Lost Light_ was so far beyond the reaches of his imagination that he didn’t know what to do with the information. He got up instead and reorganized the portable medibay, making up a list of supplies he was low on. When there was nothing left there that needed doing and the parts synthesizer still wasn’t done chugging away, Ratchet forced himself to go back to the subspace communicator and hit play on the next message.

It was a ship, four day’s travel time, asking for him to respond and inquiring if he was still in distress. Ratchet sent out a quick reply to their subspace frequency assuring them he was fine now but thanking them for their quick response.

The next message was much the same, except that ship’s captain had already changed course to mount a rescue mission. Ratchet called them up and explained the situation, throat tight with some feeling he couldn’t name.

The next seven messages were all strangers who’d rallied in response to his distress call. Ratchet replied back to each ship and let them know that he was doing fine now. Several captains recommended local webclusters Ratchet had never heard of that had information for travelers passing through the area. He thanked them for their assistance and ended the calls as quickly as possible. He was feeling overwhelmed, he decided. The news was good, impossibly good, but he just wasn’t used to dealing with that much good news at once.

There was only one message left in the queue; Ratchet considered letting it wait a bit. While he’d been reassuring his assembling cavalry, the parts synthesizer had finished its work, leaving a pile of parts for Ratchet to inspect, detail and sanitize before the operation. But, there was good odds the last message was _also_ some do-gooder rallying to his rescue.

It wasn’t. _“I received your message from a few weeks ago and wanted to let you know that we did host a fine fellow who matched the description you gave. Cybertronian, a devout mech, white with red accents, all the rest. He was here to study and meditate in peace, as many of our itinerant visitors are. I gave him the location of one of our sister spaces when it was his time to leave and I do believe that’s where he decided to go next—”_

A lead. Finally.

As the message continued, Ratchet was already changing the ship’s heading and bringing it around. Onwards towards the religious sanctuary of Ferox Fidei. He was going to have an awful lot to tell Drift when he caught up with him.

**Author's Note:**

> I love comments so feel free to tell me anything. You can also find me on tumblr at [ notwhelmedyet](http://notwhelmedyet.tumblr.com/), talking 'bout robots & being behind on lost light.


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